More Information For 365
About Suzan-Lori Parks
SUZAN-LORI PARKS is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundaton “Genius” Award, as well as the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog. She is a playwright, screenwriter and novelist whose plays include Topdog/Underdog (Public Theater), Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 Obie Award for Best New American Play), The American Play (Public Theater), Venus (Public Theater, 1996 Obie Award), The Death Of The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and In The Blood (Public Theater, 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist), among others. Her work is the subject of the PBS Film “The Topdog/Underdog Diaries.” She is an alumna of New Dramatists, and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
More info is available via The Curious Theater (who is coordinating the production here in Colorado).
Daily Camera article:
All the year's a stage
Lafayette producer, acclaimed playwright launch 365 Days/365 Plays
By Mark Collins
November 12, 2006
It was nighttime, the summer of 2005, and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks was in the car with her longtime pal, producer Bonnie Metzgar. The pair was driving through the streets of Lafayette near Metzgar's home, partaking in two of their favorite pastimes: dreaming and scheming.
Parks' play "Topdog/Underdog" won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. That same year, Parks conjured up another dream: She set out to write one play every day for 365 days, and did just that from Nov. 13, 2002, to Nov. 12, 2003.
Fast-forward to 2005, when Metzgar asked Parks what happened with her 365 plays. Turns out they were in a drawer. So it was time for another big dream.
The two thought: Let's put the 365 plays on their feet. Let's involve theater companies, regardless of size, from all over the country. Let's get them to commit to doing the plays every week for a year. Let's give complete artistic license and make all the performances free to the public.
Parks blames the audacious project on the Colorado air.
"I think it was maybe the altitude," she says via phone from Los Angeles, where she lives. "We had one of those Rocky Mountain highs going, and we were dreaming big.
"You tell the story in New York and they all look at you like, 'Huh?' But they don't know what it's like to be driving around Lafayette. Bonnie was driving. We were scheming. We were just dreaming big."
Actually, the 365 Days/365 Plays National Festival project grew bigger than Parks' and Metzgar's initial dream. They started with a goal of getting seven hub theaters involved, and now are up to 15. Each hub theater is located in a different part of the country, and each serves a leadership role in getting other theater groups on board with the project.
The total number of theater groups committed to producing the cycle of plays nationwide recently grew close to 700.
Denver's Curious Theatre is the hub theater in Colorado. In all, 53 local theater groups are on board, including 13 from Boulder County. Each of those local groups is assigned a specific week of the year, which runs through Nov. 12, 2007, to perform their week of plays from Parks' cycle. Curious begins the local cycle by performing the first seven plays Thursday through Nov. 19, while 14 other hub theaters across the country premiere the first week of plays, as well.
In Colorado, in addition to Curious, big players such as the Denver Center Theatre Company and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival are involved, alongside groups like PHAMALy, Theatre 13, Miners Alley Playhouse, and newcomers Wrecking Ball Theatre Lab, square productions and the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company.
That egalitarian ethic is on purpose.
"So often it's like the big dogs sit at one table and the little dogs sit at another table and some dogs don't have a table at all," Parks says . "Some only get the crumbs. But this project, we're really wanting to have a party, and everybody gets a seat at the table. Everybody gets a say and everybody's input is valued."
Variety of work
The plays range in length, style and topic. Some are less than a page, others two or three pages. Some are silly, some serious.
One fun little trifle is titled "Lickety Split," which simply involves a man standing on stage. A woman runs on stage and licks the man, then splits.
For other plays, Parks drew inspiration from what was happening on the day she sat down to write. Parks wrote about Valentine's on Feb. 14, and about Gregory Hines when the legendary showman died on Aug. 9. One day, Parks overheard a woman in a security line at the airport lamenting the loss of her sweater, and that turned into a play.
Since the United States was building up toward its war with Iraq when Parks began writing the cycle, war and politics crop up throughout the year of plays. One section is titled "Father Comes Home from the Wars," a series of stories that touch on homecomings.
For Metzgar, home, what it means, and how we're trying to return to it, is a constant theme in the cycle.
"It feels particularly spiritual," says Metzgar, who is associate artistic director at Curious Theatre and teaches playwriting at Brown University. "There are a lot of quests that these people are on. There's big-picture searching."
Theater Company of Lafayette will produce the final week of 2006. TCL is dubbing their seven plays "The Anti-Holiday Party," and the company will stage them Dec. 28-30 at the Mary Miller Theater in Lafayette.
TCL Artistic Director Madge Montgomery says that week of plays "deal with the loneliness and disappointment of the season." TCL plans to scour the neighborhood for discarded Christmas decorations and fill its theater with "piles of Christmas trash."
A contingent from Naropa University is putting a Buddhist spin on their week, Jan. 22-28. The group will take Parks' seven plays from that week and perform them in a contemplative improvisation form, and will invite the audience to participate.
Wrecking Ball Theatre plans to present its portion of plays (May 28-June 3) in guerrilla style at popular Boulder hang-outs such as the Pearl Street Mall, the Boulder Creek Path or Chautauqua's Royal Arch Trail, three times a day for its week.
Philip Sneed, new artistic director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, says he's not yet sure what form CSF's cycle ? Aug. 6-12 ? will take, but adds that he hopes to put some resources into the event, and future premieres of new works.
"I'm fond of saying Shakespeare ran a new-works theater," Sneed says. "He didn't do established plays, he did premieres. It's in my long-term plan to do new works, and this is a way to immediately launch into something.
"But more than that, she's a great playwright. And this is something that the Colorado theater community is getting involved in. We feel that it's really important to be involved with."
Everyday art
Along with the 365 cycle and "Topdog," Parks' plays include "Venus," "In the Blood" and "The America Play." She wrote the screenplay for Spike Lee's "Girl 6" and the television movie adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 book "Their Eyes Were Watching God," which Oprah Winfrey produced, and which starred Halle Berry.
Parks likened her dedication to sitting down and writing a play a day for a year to the discipline she's learned from practicing ashtanga yoga the past 12 years. (She's a big fan of and occasional student of Boulder-based Richard Freeman's Yoga Workshop.)
The 365 project was also a way to make the act of creating art a central part of her everyday life.
"Art's not just something that you get as a luxury, art is essential," Parks says. "Art nurtures the spirit. It helps the mind grow strong. It helps us to think deeply and clearly.
"In this country, especially, we've gotten to the point where we think art is just something for those oddball artists that they do in their funny clothing off to the side. We don't remember that art is a necessity. It need not be expensive, it need not be lavish. It need not be a full opera with $100 tickets and all that.
"It just has to be an awareness and embracing of ... it's like embracing the beauty of the world. It's recognizing the creative act every day."
Every day, as in 365 days a year.
Contact Camera Theater Critic Mark Collins at (303) 473-1369.