Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A opened at the Public Theater in February 2003. It was inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) and dramatizes the story of Hester, branded with an “A” for abortionist, and her efforts to reunite with her imprisoned son in an environment of oppression and injustice. The scrawled red lines on a black ground in Paula Scher’s design here evokes the play’s raw fury in the urban language of graffiti.