Category | Arts & Living

Year-long national theater project hosted at KSU

Published on January 31, 2007 by The Sentinel

The KSU Department of Theatre and Performance Studies introduced Week Eleven of “365 Days/365 Plays” on Sunday evening.  This project is an on-going 52-week festival that began Nov. 13, 2006 and will end Nov. 12, 2007. 

    Week eleven consisted of seven plays that lasted between five and ten minutes. In the opening performance, actors showcased the everyday deeds of an actor. This small performance set the stage and awakened curiosity for the remaining six plays, whose themes ranged from troubled marriages and families to the weather. Even when breaching subjects like “the end of the world” or a surreal look at murder, strong emotions were expressed on stage and reflected in the reactions of the audience.

    After watching all seven plays, it became apparent that the typical concept of theatre has been totally thrown out the window. The plays lead the audience from laughter to total shock and back countless times in forty-five minutes.

    KSU students and faculty were able to be a part of the fifty-two weeks of plays. The playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, began writing the 365 plays on Nov. 13, 2002 and wrote one play each day for an entire year.

    Parks described her experience in this statement:

    “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 Nov. 13.  I thought about waiting until Jan. 1 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 everyday things too would catch my eye and I’d create plays out of them,” Parks said.

    “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.”

    After having help from producer Bonnie Metzgar, the idea arose for a simultaneous world premiere and a tour of performances around the country.

    The plays are performed in each hosting theater within the respective weeks they were written. Individual groups of actors and directors, like our own in the KSU theater department, are able to interpret and mold the plays into unique performances. Along with the fundamental insights written by Parks, each play then becomes its own entity and stands alone, as well as contributes to the collection as a whole.

    KSU’s actors didn’t remain in Stillwell Theater with their performances, either. Last week, the plays were performed by “surprise” in various places around campus, including the Student Center, the new Social Sciences building, and in several Arts in Society classes.

    Cast members reported mixed responses from fellow students. Some enjoyed the odd stories. Others did anything they could to ignore the scenes, even if it meant leaving the area. Some even reported being told to stop what they were doing.

    “I seemed to have a knack for sitting next to people who are studying for tests,” said actor Lowrey Brown of his roaming performances.

    The group found people’s reactions to their performances almost as interesting as the plays themselves, and discussed this, among other things, in a feedback session with audience members after the production. The project proved an intriguing analysis for all parties: cast, directors and audience.

    Week Twelve begins Jan. 29, and will be held at Collection of Spelman & Morehouse Alumni.

The project will be returning to our own Stillwell Theatre this fall, hosting Week 46 from Sept. 24 to Sept. 30. The continuation of this creative endeavor here on campus will offer an ever deeper insight into Parks’ enormous creation, as interpreting two separate groupings of her plays will allow both for contrast and recurrent themes.

    Information on the festival is available at www.myspace.com/atlanta365 or www.365days365plays.com.