Dramaturgy as Devotion: 365 Days/365 Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks

Short Form

Starting on November 13, 2002, Suzan-Lori Parks wrote one short play every day for a year, accumulating them by the following November into a cycle entitled 365 Days/365 Plays. The plays range in length from two lines of stage directions or dialogue to several pages, but even the shortest of them is a complete world. From one perspective, the project is an ultramarathon in dramatic writing. Seen another way, however, the cycle appears to be quite the opposite: an experiment in short form.

The experiment was inspired by Parks’s ten-year Ashtanga yoga practice, a connection she has discussed in relation to the cycle in numerous interviews. Ashtanga yoga, as taught by K. Pattabhi Jois, includes a set series of yoga postures to be completed daily in the same order. In some ways similar to practicing musical scales in preparation for playing a longer, more complicated piece of music, yoga postures are practiced, according to master teacher David Swenson, as a “vehicle to access a deeper internal awareness.”¹ This awareness is one way of describing the spiritual, sacred nature of yoga practice. Yet unlike musical scales, which are valuable primarily as preparatory exercises for playing music, yoga postures are conceived as the music itself; so, too, Parks’s daily compositions are their own tiny, finished pieces, not preparation exercises for writing a magnum opus, but connected compositions in their own right.

Both aspects of the cycle’s creation—the long and the short—were taken up in the producing model Parks conceived with her longtime friend and producer Bonnie Metzgar. Over the course of a year, from November 2006 to November 2007, the cycle was produced simultaneously by thousands of theatre artists, primarily in the United States, in free performances staged in all kinds of spaces, ranging from major regional theatres to libraries to city buses. It was a long-distance relay unprecedented in the history of theatre, but one made possible only by breaking the mammoth thing into small pieces—the participants were each responsible for seven plays, or one week’s worth of the cycle.

Building a huge work of art piece by piece offered an opportunity for artists to join Parks’s spiritual experiment in short form and daily creation. Because the 365 Festival required that performances had to be free, participating artists were connected not by market concerns but by their shared desire to create art. For people attempting to make their lives in the theatre, the act of creation can sometimes be buried under grant writing, budgeting, or working day jobs for rent money. In recruiting participants before the festival’s launch, Parks and Metzgar routinely offered their conviction that the creation of art is a spiritual practice, and artists and other cultural workers responded with agreement. Their enthusiasm was reiterated over the festival year, as participants frequently spoke of their happiness at the opportunity to reconnect with their original desires to make theatre and also with a reanimated feeling of connection to the deep purposes of making art. Among them, Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater in New York, described the festival as “a meditation in almost a religious fashion on the power of theatre.”² I’d agree, and also suggest the inverse, that the festival was a meditation in theatrical fashion on the spiritual purposes of art.

I was part of the team producing the festival through the year and had an extended opportunity to contemplate the nature of its spiritual geography as the project took shape in artistic communities across the U.S. and beyond. The journey revealed a more vibrant theatre landscape than I had thought existed in the U.S. especially outside major urban centers. The landscape had an elastic nature; it expanded as artists took the plays with them on the road, as when Elinor Fuchs taught the plays to German students in Berlin over the summer. Over the year, this adventurous, thriving theatre community was connected through its shared investigation of the weird, formally challenging plays of Parks’s cycle.

Tradition...