One Play A Day
‘365’ theater project unites U.S. colleges and universities.

By Mark Blankenship

Undergraduate theater students rarely get the chance to work on a major world premiere, but this year hundreds of them will. Currently, more than 70 colleges and universities are participating in “365 Days/365 Plays,” an ambitious project from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Every week, as they mount their portion of this epic experiment, another group of students and teachers will be ushered into theater history.

But while it now involves thousands of artists, “365 Days/365 Plays” began as a single, tantalizing question. Is it possible, Parks wondered, to write a play every day for an entire year? On Nov. 13, 2002 — just months after the searing drama “Topdog/Underdog” made her the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama — she decided to find out.

Each morning, Parks produced a new script. Some were just a few sentences, and some were several pages. Some consisted only of stage directions — like a play called “Lickety Splits,” in which a woman licks a man all over his body — and some were responses to the headlines of a particular morning. There are tributes to celebrities like Gregory Hines, who passed away in the summer of 2003, and there is a series of pieces that transforms Shakespeare characters into modern American soldiers. The plays may not tell a single, ongoing story, but they are unified in their testament to a playwright’s will.

Fittingly, the structure created to produce “365” is as ambitious as the work itself. The 700 participating theaters — with more joining every week — have been divided into a series of networks across the United States and Canada. Each network is responsible for mounting all 365 plays, and each theater in a network must produce at least seven of the scripts. The productions began on Nov. 13, 2006, exactly four years after Parks started working, and they will end on Nov. 12, 2007. Generally, each network has been presenting the plays in the order Parks wrote them, which means that every week a new batch of scripts debuts simultaneously in theaters around North America.