365 Days/365 Plays Project is a grassroots national theater festival conceived by Suzan-Lori Parks and Bonnie Metzgar which seeks to create a new geography for artistic production in the Internet age. Linking artists locally, nationally and internationally in simultaneous production over the course of an entire year, this project will map the rich diversity of the American theatrical landscape in new and surprising ways for audiences both live and online.
Suzan-Lori Parks said: "A few years ago I got this notion-- I'd write a play a day for a whole year. 'I'm going to write a play a day for a whole year! I'll call it 365 Days/365 Plays!' I told my husband Paul. 'Yeah, baby, that sounds cool,' Paul said, and so I started writing. It was 13 November. I thought about waiting until 1 January to begin but, I wanted to keep it real, so I started right where I was. Every day for the next year I would wake up and ask myself "ok, so what's the play?" and I wrote down what came. Sometimes a famous person had just died, so they got their own play, we were going to war, so war got a lot of plays, smaller every day things too would catch my eye and I'd create plays out of them. For me, the act of writing a play a day was great fun. It was also like a puja, or an extended daily prayer, and kind of like walking a pilgrimage on my knees. It was wild and necessary and arduous and delicious. On 12 Nov the following year -- I had 365 plays -- actually more because on some days I wrote more than one play. A couple of theatres suggested productions but I wanted something more radical than a conventional world premiere -- something that would jive with the spirit of the plays. One day Bonnie Metzgar asked me 'What's up with those 365 plays?' 'I've done them,' I said. 'Yeah, but now you've got to do them,' Bonnie said. And together we created a production model which would speak to the spirit of my plays: a simultaneous and shared world premiere involving hundreds of theatres around the country."
The plays have been divided into weeks, corresponding to the week during which they were written in 2002. Each participating Atlanta arts organization will inherit the task of presenting one week's worth of material. 365 DAYS/365 PLAYS will be performed simultaneously in cities throughout the United States from November 13, 2006 through November 12, 2007.
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