The Playwright's Full Calendar
Suzan-Lori Parks Sets the Stage for Nationwide '365 Days'

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, November 18, 2006

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!

In participating locales -- which include such cities as Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and Austin and vaster regions such as the Carolinas -- activity revolves around "hub" theaters. Each hub vetted applications and/or recruited partners until it had 52 participating organizations, each agreeing to do a week's worth of works.

In New York, the Public is the hub. In Washington, it's the Studio, helped by a "council" that includes the African Continuum Theatre Company, Round House Theatre, Signature Theatre and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. (Performance venues and schedules can be found on the Studio Web site, which links to the "365 Days/365 Plays" national site.)

The only guidelines from Parks and Metzgar: Perform the works chronologically, respect the text and keep admission free (or perhaps pass a hat for donations).

"Yes, we have the Public Theatre," Parks said, mock-trumpeting a fanfare. "But also old folks' homes in Atlanta." And architecture students and scientists and visual artists taking the material on.

"If Donald Rumsfeld has some time on his hands," she jested, feeling for the outer reaches of inclusiveness.

Splashy as it is, there's no money in it for Parks; her licensing fee is $1 per play. And though "365" was published this week by Theatre Communications Group, it's also available on TCG's Web site -- one play a day, for free.

"Negative money," Parks said breezily. She seems genuinely awed and energized by the innovation and connections flowering around her. This opening week alone, she and Metzgar are trekking through New York, the "365 University" at Yale, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, San Antonio and finishing in Denver, where Metzgar is associate artistic director of the Curious Theatre Company.

"And all through the year," Parks said, "it'll be like a year-long party."

In Chicago, Serendipity Theatre Collective will read its group of Parks plays at a wine bar. Bailiwick Repertory Theatre is working with seven new directors, all using the set for "The Christmas Schooner" during a week when that family show is scheduled strictly for matinees. Said Artistic Director David Zak, "We all talk about building cultural bridges, but often it's hard enough just to keep your own doors open."

In Manhattan, the Foundry Theatre's programming currently revolves around food, water and shelter, so its installment of "365" will be the centerpiece of "A Free-Range Thanksgiving." It's a once-only feast for 100 people, divided equally between theater artists and food producers -- farmers and distributors.

"There is no audience," explained Foundry Artistic Director Melanie Joseph. "It's a dinner. That Suzan-Lori was generous enough to make this available to that kind of freedom was glorious."

In Washington, approaches will include the Studio's traditional "chamber theater" staging on the set of its recently closed "Red Light Winter" and a radio teleconference by the American Century Theatre the week before Christmas. Studio dramaturg Danielle Mages Amato, Washington's "365" coordinator, cautions that all concepts are "provisional," that things might change.

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."