365 Days/365 Plays

Listen up: Brilliant writer -- Mount Holyoke, MacArthur genius grant, Pulitzer Prize, she's da bomb, all right? -- lives with her cats and her blues-musician husband in Venice (that's L.A.'s Venice), wakes up on Nov. 13, 2002, decides it'd be a good idea to write a play every day for a year (no exceptions), and she's honing her craft but this is also the run-up to the war in Iraq so of course a lot of her one-page sketches bash Bush real; husband says "cool," next thing you know there are theaters doing weeks and months of her 365-play cycle all over the country. (Got it goin' on right now in Seattle.) But in the meantime, you can enjoy this book -- which has its bland patches, sure (I sympathize with whoever has to perform the September plays) -- but Suzan-Lori Parks didn't learn from James Baldwin how to write drama like *Topdog/Underdog* for nothin'. At their best, Parks' playlets are miniature lessons in how to write for the stage. Parks has her fixations -- Abraham Lincoln (he lives to age 89); arms that are frozen before the knife can kill; racial injustice; literalized metaphors (an actual Window of Opportunity that actually closes shut); stage directions that can never be enacted; playing possum; plutocracy ("The Presidents Day Sale"); warmonger dictators -- but it's interesting to watch her ring her themes' changes. Many plays are startling and compact, with topics like watching over a sleeping stranger as an image of compassion ("The 1st Constant"); spoofing Neil Simon ("Barefoot and Pregnant in the Park"); Bush murdering his own soldier and calling it "poignant" ("House to House"); mothers protecting and relinquishing their children ("Behind the Veil of the Goddess"); breaking the cycle of poverty and crime ("My Father Was a Famous Mother"); women and men always failing to get along ("Epic Bio-Pic," "Vase" and "Bear"); representing despair and its cure metaphorically ("Plenty"); and ridiculing sectarian war ("Everybody's Got an Aunt Jemimah"). Some plays overlap; some plays interrupt others; and some of Suzan-Lori Parks' plays stretch people's minds out to infinity.

this is an innovative, intimate, lumen to a writers personal daily offering. Suzan-lori Parks has written a play a day for a year totaling over 365 works ( on some days she wrote more then one. Each play or playlet is of gem quality and despite their brief duration some less than a page, are nevertheless complete works. it is the distilled, no frills quality of these plays that bring the nectar sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter. well worth reading or performing as can be attested by the numerous actors and production companies now involved with the national premier of these plays. Over seven hundred theatre companies in 15 different cities have come on board for the production. A great addition to a library of classic, enduring work