The Playwright's Full Calendar

But the plays, some of which end with stage directions stating that the scene continues forever, certainly seem amenable to offbeat approaches. And that, Parks said, is the point: to remain as open to ideas in production as she had to be while writing each morning, without fail, for a year.

For a playwright, that means there was no instant rope line keeping out iffy ideas. "If I have a bouncer at the door saying, 'You, you, but not you,' I'm sitting in the room with writer's block," she said.

That willingness to embrace the unknown doesn't diminish the questions as "365" finally steams into view: What's it all about? Is it any good? Is it the largest theatrical premiere ever or the largest workshop? As Metzgar said, "We don't know how it works as theater until we start seeing it as theater."

According to Amato, the piece collectively "reflects the thematic and stylistic concerns that run through her work -- race, American history, identity, class, gender, her signature language, theatrical rule-breaking, her sense of humor."

Metzgar directed a table reading at the Public a few months ago so the playwright could hear it and make sure the actors could parse her often idiosyncratic grammar. Metzgar mused, "Will we see some of these short plays grow into full-length Suzan-Lori Parks plays?"

Both day-to-day and cumulatively, Parks trusted in what she calls the "divine intelligence" (nothing religious, but an inspirational spirit), never getting hung up on where she was going.

"You can't think: 'Oh, what's it gonna . . .?' " she said, whining to illustrate the stultifying worry. "If you start doing that, I think the wind -- woo-hoo! -- It begins to blow."

She looked down the long, long conference table and play-acted pushing against a prairie gale. "The wind is like, ohhhhhhh.. . . But you just get down, you know?"

She slid off her chair and put her face at table level. "Like that. And then," Parks said, "you're just so grounded to the moment."