In the Blood is the stronger performance of the two, thanks to its cast and director Sarah Benson’s keen grasp of Parks’s killingly dry humor. While you might slip out of one with some illusions about the world intact-the other is waiting a few feet away, ready to smash them with a hammer. The productions aren’t perfect both ensembles need more velocity, and miscasting hampers Fucking A. This time, however, the Signature has programmed the Red Letter Plays simultaneously in two of the complex’s theaters, which sets up a frightening resonance in the building. The Signature Theatre has selected Parks as one of their Residency One playwrights, so in the last two seasons they’ve also mounted her furious theatrical lyric The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990) and Venus (1996), another feminist bruiser from her Brechtian period. In In the Blood, six monologue “confessions” interrupt the action in Fucking A, she includes Weill-esque musical numbers like “Working Woman’s Song” and the jailbird lament “The Making of a Monster.” Each play bangs out its moral emphasis, like a woman with a drum. Using Brecht’s epic form, Parks has characters turn constantly outward to explain themselves, so there’s no doubt about what she wants us to feel or think. Because of this, they manage to be both wildly poetic and as diamond-clear as parables. In the Blood and Fucking A, though, come from that golden middle age-written in 19 respectively-when she was just shifting away from the radical disorientations of her first masterpieces and starting to look to Brecht. These days her mode is fable-tinted realism: her Father Comes Home from the Wars (2014) is hugely accessible by the standards of her early work. She started in the late 1980s writing avant-garde head-trips like Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989), reached the pinnacle of critical acclaim with jazz-inflected allegories like Topdog/Underdog (2001), then-after winning the Pulitzer for that play-swept closer to an almost conventional theatrical style. Parks has slowly, in her astonishing thirty-year career, percolated into the mainstream. They both revolve around a “fallen” woman named Hester they’re both terrifying. It’s such a natural gesture to program Suzan-Lori Parks’s partner-plays In the Blood and Fucking A together, it makes you wonder-why has no other theater done this yet? The pieces were born from the same mother-thought: each is what Parks calls a “riff” on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (she wrote one while trying to break through writer’s block on the other). The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A and In the Blood, by Suzan-Lori Parks, the Signature Theatre, 480 West Forty-Second Street, through Octo(Fucking A ) and Octo(In the Blood )

In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks