Pair From Southland Win Prizes in the Arts

Two of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes in arts categories--drama, music and literature--were snagged by Southern Californians.

The drama award went to a hot young playwright who has only recently taken up residence in Venice, and the music award to a maverick 88-year-old composer who has lived and worked on his unusual “spatial compositions” in Santa Barbara for 20 years.

As a winner for her play “Topdog/Underdog,” which opened Sunday night at the Ambassador Theater in New York City, Suzan-Lori Parks, 38, becomes the first African American woman to win the prize for drama.

The playwright, who heads the A.S.K. Theater Projects Writing for Performance Program at California Institute of the Arts, moved to Venice about a year and a half ago with her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher. Among her other current projects is “Hoopz,” a Disney Theatricals stage project about the Harlem Globetrotters.

The prize for music went to Henry Brant for “Ice Field.” The 20-minute composition, which the composer describes as typical of his work, places musicians not just onstage but also throughout the performance space. “In balconies, and in boxes, in small groups, as soloists--each of these groups throughout the hall has different music to play simultaneously,” Brant said Monday from his home. “Ice Field” premiered in December at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall with the San Francisco Philharmonic, with the composer himself improvising at the pipe organ.

In an interview from New York on Monday, playwright Parks said winning a Pulitzer “feels great--we were just down at the theater, and it was like a spontaneous party on the sidewalk. We had champagne, we were hugging and dancing around, it was fun. It’s just a joy.”

She downplayed the significance of her status as the first African American woman to win a prize in drama. “That’s what they’re telling me, so I guess it’s true,” said Parks, who was born in Fort Knox, Ky. She added that she is gratified that her play, a family portrait of two brothers named Lincoln and Booth--their father’s little joke--is drawing a crowd that includes all races and ages, from Broadway regulars to young people “with their hats on backwards,” experiencing theater for the first time. “It’s a wonderful day not just for me, but for all the people who worked on ‘Topdog/Underdog,’ and for American theater,” Parks said. “This is not just a play about African American people, but it’s a play that includes everybody.”

For his part, Brant is gratified to be recognized after 50 years of composing outside the box. Born in Montreal, Brant moved with his family to New York in 1929. There, he began to compose experimental music, but, he said: “The Depression put a stop to that; you couldn’t get an unusual piece [performed] after that. It was only after World War II that it was possible again to work along unusual lines.

“I never expected that the kind of music that I write would win a Pulitzer,” he continued. “It’s also an encouragement to me to continue along these general lines. I hope to write some very large works, for big choral groups, and big instrumental groups, with the addition of ensembles from other cultures.

“I’m in favor of acoustic music, played live by living performers; in my music I never use electronics or even amplification,” he said. “It’s like a diet--organic is best.”

In the fiction category, Richard Russo, 52, surprised some among the literati by winning the Pulitzer for his novel “Empire Falls” over finalist Jonathan Franzen, author of “The Corrections.” Franzen’s novel, the saga of a dysfunctional Midwestern family, won a National Book Award in 2001 and gained some notoriety when author Franzen, instead of expressing gratitude at being an Oprah Book Club selection, expressed ambivalence at having the book club sticker attached to his book. (The other fiction finalist was “John Henry Days” by Colson Whitehead.)

Winner Russo called his prize “pretty remarkable. I’ve come to think of [“Empire Falls”] as a snapshot of America at the end of the millennium, or the beginning of a new millennium,” he said. “When I started out, it was this huge, wide canvas, but at heart it’s really a pretty simple story, a father-daughter story, born out of my thinking about what kind of world my daughters would be facing, what dangers, and what it would do to them.”

The history prize went to Louis Menand for “The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America,” which the author calls an “intellectual history from the Civil War to the first World War.”

“This is great--I think more people will feel that it’s something worth their attention,” he said.

The prize for biography went to David McCullough for “John Adams.” The Pulitzer for general nonfiction went to Diane McWhorter for “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution,” which explores the forces opposing civil rights in her hometown. The poetry award went to Carl Dennis for “Practical Gods.”