The first major study of this unique voice in contemporary drama. Suzan-Lori Parks confirmed herself as one of the most exciting and successful playwrights of her generation when winning the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, making her the only African American woman to win the award.

The 'macabre', as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre - and more broadly, performance - for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at...