The Playwright's Full Calendar

Suzan-Lori Parks Sets the Stage for Nationwide '365 Days'

A MacArthur "genius" grant. A Pulitzer Prize for drama. A Broadway hit.

It was the spring of 2002 and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, nearing 40, had the world on a string. The woman behind "Topdog/Underdog" was a hot commodity, and theaters everywhere were drooling to have her next play.

So few could have guessed she'd disappear for a year to write an ungainly 365 of them -- that is, one a day.

"I had lots of groups thinking they knew what I should do next," Parks said recently in New York, citing the multiple pressures she felt four years ago (including becoming the first African American woman to win the drama Pulitzer). "But I'm Suzan-Lori Parks, see? That's the asterisk."

It signifies unpredictability, such as the uncertainty surrounding the unproduced Hollywood screenplays she's been well-paid to write lately for the likes of Brad Pitt and Denzel Washington.

"That's the little asterisk by What Will She Do Next?" Parks said. "When I write plays, or even movies, I'm not looking over my shoulder wondering what people will think. I'm just doing what I gotta do."

That means the extraordinary year-long "365 Days/365 Plays" festival, with whole cities marching simultaneously through the cycle. The event launched Monday with a performance and book signing at Manhattan's Public Theatre; in Washington, it begins with this afternoon's performance of Week 1 at the Studio Theatre.

Parks's comments are less about swagger and more about her recognizing her own oddity: the unconventional pattern that has always characterized her work.

It's a career that has never come with ready-made audience hooks and that continues to defy expectations. So she's running late on a recent Friday -- 15 minutes past her scheduled interview at the Public Theatre and, yes, four years late since "Topdog" and all that noise.

Her belated arrival is like a helicopter landing -- a steady, powerful engine stirring the atmosphere. Parks glides in and immediately fills the sunlit conference room with dynamic talk and vivid theatrical gestures, much as she's animating hundreds of stages nationwide beginning this week.

"My greatest joy is writing the plays. I've already had my biggest fun. So this is just icing on the gravy," she said with Parksian whimsy. "If anybody else wants to play, fine. If not, it's okay. No worries."

The plays range from one to five pages, some whimsical (like "Lickety Split," a literal licking followed by flight), others grave and recurring ("Father Comes Home From the Wars"). The sheer volume -- a 500-page manuscript that Parks and producing partner Bonnie Metzgar sensibly declined to distribute en masse to hundreds of theaters -- coupled with this festival premiere makes "365" sound a bit like a Guinness Book stunt, or perhaps a sly gag from one of Parks's backward-glancing plays: Biggest Theatrical Collaboration in U.S. History!