These Are the Days
Suzan-Lori Parks's year of writing dangerously yields 365 plays
By Kathryn Walat
Suzan-Lori Parks and Bonnie Metzgar are on the trip of a lifetime. The longtime friends and partners-in-crime have turned themselves into ambassadors of play, dual hosts at a party that will last an entire year.
Parks and Metzgar have cooked up a unique production concept for Parks's equally unique play-a-day writing project, and invited more than 700 theatre groups across America to join them. How did all this come about? The pair has a creation myth to go along with the plays.
"The only thing you're going to be missing by talking to us on the phone are the essential gestures," Parks says in a late-September double interview, "because talking about this project has become its own little show." Metzgar, who has just patched in from a train—she's on her way to Providence, R.I., where she holds the post of acting director of graduate playwriting at the Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium—adds, "At this point it's bordering on choreography." Their companionable laughter melds together as they launch into a well-traveled spiel about the genesis of 365 Days/365 Plays.
"On the 13th of November, 2002," says Parks—it was just seven months after she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her play Topdog/Underdog—"I got this idea that I wanted to write a play a day for the whole year. I was running around the living room, going in this high-pitched voice, 'I'm gonna write a play a day for a whole year, and it's gonna be called 365 Days/365 Plays!' My husband, Paul, was sitting on the couch"—her husband Paul Oscher is a noted blues musician—"and he was like, 'Yeah, baby, that sounds cool.'" Oscher, Parks notes, usually doesn't think anything about theatre is cool. "So when he said that, immediately I wanted to do this thing."
Parks began that very day with a play entitled Start Here. When she woke up the next day in her Venice, Calif., home in a what-the-hell-have-I-gotten-myself-into panic, she calmed herself by sitting down and writing the second play, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Part 1), which became the first of a recurring series in the cycle. "With those two plays, it was like I had two places to put my feet, and I could walk forward," Parks explains. "The idea was basically to show up and work with what you've got." Parks picks this moment to describe essential gesture number one: "Here's where I raise hands to the sky, wiggle fingers, and the line is: 'Okay, God, so what's the play?' And I'd write down whatever came."
Some days Parks channeled a world event, like the U.S. fighting the war in Iraq; sometimes the subject was a small event, like when she overheard a woman complaining that she'd just lost her sweater. Johnny Cash, Barry White and Carol Shields, all of whom died that year, each got a play. "You really begin to see a play in everything," Parks elaborates. "I was in Chicago last night reading from one of my plays for an audience, and I stopped to take a drink of water—and I said: 'Don't worry, this is not part of the play.' And then I realized: 'No, actually it is.'" By taking "all the world's a stage" to heart, by Nov. 12, 2003, Parks had indeed completed her 365 plays—hundreds of typed pages of divine, yet worldly, inspiration.
At this point in the creation myth, Parks performs essential gesture number two: "I begin to roll my hands in a circular fashion, one over another, and then open them up and say: 'And now, Bonnie Metzgar!'" Taking the stage, Metzgar fast-forwards the story to summer 2005, when Parks was visiting Denver, where Metzgar works as associate artistic director of Curious Theatre Company. "We were driving around in my jeep," Metzgar relates, "and I asked her what was going on with the 365 plays she'd decided to write." Parks chimes in: "I was like, 'Well, I did 'em.' And then Bonnie was like, 'But now we have to do 'em.'"
"As I read through the complete cycle, I was struck by this amazing space that Suzan-Lori made for herself, to connect to art at the center of her life every day," Metzgar offers, more seriously. "It was this very intimate thing between her and her muse, but I started imagining what it might be to try to turn that intimacy outward." A couple of theatres expressed interest in producing 365 Days/365 Plays, but the conventional model of one theatre premiering the work as a whole did not seem to match the form of this unusual project. "The energy of the production somehow needed to dovetail with the energy of the text," Parks reasons.
Playing on the project's magic number, Parks and Metzgar began talking about getting 365 theatres involved—which initially felt like saying "let's paint ourselves purple and fly to the moon," Metzgar remarks. But the two canvassed the country, creating interest, actively courting performance groups across regional lines, ethnic lines, economic lines—and people answered their call. From their initial, seemingly impossible target of 7 networks with 52 theatres each, the project's statistical base has already rocketed to double that. At press time, with the list still growing and changing, there were no fewer than 13 regional hubs from which performances of 365 Days/365 Plays will emanate—Atlanta, Austin, Bay Area, Chicago, Colorado, Greater Texas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Seattle, Southeast/Carolinas, and Washington, D.C.—in addition to a university circuit that crisscrosses the country.
The idea is that each of these hubs will enlist 52 distinct performing entities to each perform one week's worth of plays. That comes to at least 728 groups, varying from major regional theatres to ensembles formed for the very purpose of taking part in this project. The cycle will be set into motion this Nov. 13; in each of the hubs, groups will simultaneously be performing each week's plays, continuing for the next 365 days.
Each of the networks works in a slightly different way. In New York, the cycle is organized around one theatre in a strong leadership position—in this case, the Public Theater. Artistic director Oskar Eustis contends that this project "is allowing the Public to serve one of its historic functions, which is to be a venue and a protective umbrella for the wildly diverse assembly of New York theatres and theatre artists." Other companies have applied to participate in the project, and have been given complete freedom to present their weeks however and wherever they choose, but according to the Public's guidelines: "All must be in the spirit of celebrating the vibrancy of New York's theatre tradition, with audiences and artists from every corner of the city.
In addition to performances during their assigned weeks, on one Sunday each month the New York City participants are invited to share their work in a free public performance at the Public—a gathering that Eustis has dubbed "church." He explains, "Suzan-Lori wrote these plays as a meditative, ritualistic act, which she did alone every morning. In producing them, we needed to decide how to translate that individual act into a social and collective act of meditation. That's the best definition I know of a church."
Within the Greater Texas network (which is based out of San Antonio, and is distinct from Austin's own hub), the organization is far more organic and collectively driven. Miriam R. Leal, managing director of performance and production company La Colectiva and coordinator for the hub, describes it as "a tightly woven ensemble of independent artists and producers." In addition to such established theatres such as Jump-Start Performance Co. and San Pedro Playhouse, the network includes an architecture professor at University of Texas-San Antonio who is using Parks's plays as a scene-design challenge for his upper-level studio class, and a community of visual artists who will mount their show during the CAM (Contemporary Art Month) festival. "Alamo City Rollergirls have also expressed an interest," Leal notes.
"Most of the performances across Texas will be held in nontraditional spaces like coffee shops, music venues, galleries, street corners," Leal goes on, "in addition to spaces like the Chinati Foundation in Marfa and an arts-based office space in McAllen called the M2 Incubator." La Colectiva's producing director, Marisela Barrera, admires the project because "it is grassroots while utilizing new methods of communication and technology." She adds, "The buzz in our community is building."
Meanwhile, in Seattle, from the start there has been a conscious effort both to spread the project across the arts community and to bring together groups that do various other types of cultural programming. In its town meeting-like gathering of potential participants, Metzgar says, "Seattle was by far the most diverse group of people in the room together." Nick Schwartz-Hall, producing director at Seattle Repertory Theatre, notes that in creating their network, "We wanted the widest reach possible, so we made a consortium out of four groups, two of which are not even theatres." Seattle Rep and the Empty Space have teamed up with Town Hall Seattle, a community cultural center, and Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas.
"People doing film, choreographers, installationists" were all recruited, Schwartz-Hall says. "Seattle Public Library is in. We think that we'll be doing something at Elliott Bay Book Company. And we've issued a challenge to see who can do something at a gas station. We're building community here." Even the mayor's office has signed on for a week.
The university circuit is yet another network entirely unto itself. Different schools will perform different weeks, but in the place of the connection of a city or region, the primary means of linking will be through the Internet, says Rebecca Rugg, associate chair of playwriting at Yale School of Drama and organizer of 365 University. "Each school will post video documentation of their performance on the website, where there will also be opportunities for audience and participant discussion," Rugg explains. "It's a great way to explore the frontiers of online performance and community."
The colleges and universities participating span the country and extend to Canada—even to one school in England. "A professor from Hendrix College just north of Little Rock, Ark., is trying to bring her participating students to the festival's kickoff in New York," says Rugg, "and two professors at Notre Dame are arranging a collaboration between their classes 'Theatre and Social Activism' and 'Performance, Culture and Creativity.'" Rugg hopes the impact of the plays on campus will be twofold, giving "student artists a chance to feel a newfound immediacy in their work, and the chance to bring theatre to an academic audience who might not otherwise be interested." Immediacy seems to be the byword, as performances are planned in the hotspots of college life, from dining halls and university quads to hallways, bathrooms and student unions.
So what makes 365 Days/365 Plays such an exciting and accessible project for so many different kinds of theatres, groups and artists? A major factor is money. Going from a "show up and work with what you've got" mantra in the project's writing stage, to the "let's include as many people as possible" production ideal, led Parks and Metzgar to "let's make it a dollar a day" for the licensing fee. (As Parks acknowledges, "A lot of people can't afford to do Topdog/Underdog.") Another appeal of the project is that it's a known-unknown—while theatres sign on for a particular week without ever seeing the plays that they will be performing, they do know that they will be getting seven Suzan-Lori Parks plays.
"I think there's something about Suzan-Lori as an artist," Metzgar adds, "that speaks to many different kinds of theatre practitioners as well as theatre audiences. And there's something about her as a person—anyone who's met her or seen her speak knows why people cherish her." In addition to the appeal of Parks and her plays, 365 Days/365 Plays also offers theatres and artists a rare opportunity to be part of a national project while retaining artistic control over their own production. Barrera, of 365 Greater Texas, sees it as "creating a virtual linking-of-arms with theatres across the nation." She adds, "It's also about defining 'national premiere.'" Considering the Public's role, Eustis hopes to raise awareness of "our deep underlying unity, which makes us all part of the large project of creating American culture."
On the other side of the coin, once the performing groups sign on and receive their week's worth of plays, there are no stipulations about how to perform them. "We meet you where you are, wherever your budget allows you. And that makes people get excited," Parks adds.
The power of the sum-total of these productions—or the promise of what they will be—is mirrored by the 365 plays themselves. The pieces vary from plays that are several pages long, complete with distinct characters and fully realized story arcs, to those that are only a paragraph in length—in some cases, they consist only of stage directions. Each is its own small work, its own theatrical moment; taken together, they create the sense of a much larger world, its edges running off the page. The meditative underpinnings of Parks's writing process are reflected in the almost zen-like experience of reading the plays one after another, after another, after another—an experience that will be made available to all with TCG Books's publication of a book edition of the plays, due out later this month.
Throughout the fabric of the text there are themes, images and characters that weave in and out. The fact of our nation at war is something that Parks returns to again and again, and not just in the Father Comes Home from the Wars series that she began on day two. Bertie and Dolly, two women soldiers, unroll a red carpet on Nov. 28; on Dec. 7, the carpet is still on stage when the Carpet Cleaner goes to work on it, and Bertie and Dolly reappear to admire his work. Fans of Parks's earlier plays will note that she returns to the action of hole-digging and to the spectacle of dead presidents, particularly Lincoln, as well as his wife, Mary, and Elizabeth Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln's African-American dressmaker and handmaid. There is a sense of Parks's grounding in dramatic history as well, as she slyly adapts the Greeks, Shakespeare and Chekhov in some of her daily creations.
Perhaps more than anything else, the plays reflect Parks's trademark sense of humor, and her individual, theatrical way of perceiving the world. There is Dec. 16's This Is Probably Not a Play, a poetic piece about "this Vietnamese kid who just held the door of the Uptown Number 6." The following week's batch of plays include Does It Matter What You Do?, composed entirely of stage directions, which include: "They walk, run, dance, act, wrestle, box, doctor, lawyerize, whatever, each according with their profession, at full speed downstage, falling into the orchestra pit…Again and again with no end in sight even as the lights fade to black, even as the curtains go down and even as the audience and crew and entire world goes home." The next day's play is entitled This Is Shit, in which an audience gathers to watch a play and the character Program Thrower utters a single line (yep, the title says it all).
In September, Metzgar directed a two-day reading of the first half of the plays at the Public in the same space Topdog/Underdog premiered five years earlier. The reading was aimed at allowing Parks to tweak and finalize the text; it also gave the two women their first experience hearing the plays out loud. The two days left Metzgar with the sense that "inside these plays is a mythology that is very spiritually based, and is very timeless. And it's funny, because some of it is really just like a guy peeing on a car," she laughs, referring to Dec. 3's play Impala and its next-day companion Pussy. "And yet somehow it's tapping into something that is so much deeper than that."
Joan MacIntosh was among the actors who participated in the reading, and something she said in a discussion following the event has stuck with Parks. "I'm paraphrasing, but she said something like, 'It's as if working through the plays allows you to connect to a river of spirit,'" Parks says. "All of a sudden I realized—that's the through-line for the plays. With every production, with every interaction with an actor or director in every different city, we're going to come to understand this spirit, and it's going to continue to unfold."
Facilitating that unfolding, of course, has been the great challenge for the pair over the past year. "Writing the plays is just about stretching out," says Park, who likens herself to athlete Lance Armstrong, a "junkie for hard work," for whom writing a play a day was the easy part. What is harder is "actually having to physically walk through the process. This is definitely outside my comfort zone," she says of the hop-on-a-plane, what-city-are-we-in, who-are-we-talking-to-now details that currently demand her flexibility.
For her part, Metzgar posits, "I think one of my great strengths as a producer is that I am really dogged, and I chase down every detail, and it's been a huge effort for me to slow down and really listen to other producing ideas, and to get excited about other people's ideas and visions." Metzgar considers herself and Parks to be the hosts, rather than producers, of 365 Days/365 Plays, inviting people to make shows, inviting people to come to them. She readily acknowledges that once the performances begin, they have no idea "what it's going to feel like, what's the rhythm of it." She does know that, while the past year has been about engaging artists across America, "as of Nov. 13, it's all going to become about the audience."
"It's larger than my understanding of it—it's got a life of its own, this thing," Parks adds. She remembers a moment in Denver, as she and Metzgar helped organize the Colorado network, and a group of potential 365 participants walked in the room. "Have you ever heard of Pueblo? I hadn't heard of Pueblo. These three people—three young people—come in. One's this tall handsome black guy, one's this groovy white kid with wire-rimmed glasses, and one's this cool white chick with red hair and a velvet jacket on, right? They're like the Mod Squad. Steel City Theatre—they drive hours from Pueblo to come to a meeting in Denver because they want to be on board, they are down with it. And I'm sitting there, and my heart is breaking, because I'm like: Oh, this is a beautiful place. The myth of America the beautiful—it's true."
Kathryn Walat is a New York-¬based playwright. Her play Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen will premiere this January at Women's Project.