IF Suzan-Lori Parks and Bonnie Metzgar could sell Chevys the way they're selling plays without a test drive, without even a peek under the hood they'd be rescuing General Motors instead of Pied Pipering several hundred American theater companies toward destinations unknown. Parks is the livewir...(More...)
And you thought Austin cranked out a lot of Shostakovich when local artists devoted a year to celebrating his work. (And it has: The unprecedented collaboration among area cultural organizations has yielded some 50 concerts and productions in which the Russian composer's work is highlighted.) Well, ...(More...)
Although Downtown is no longer the site of the start and finish of the Los Angeles Marathon (the 2007 race will begin in Universal City), the community will host the kick-off and climax of a marathon theatrical work. Officials with Center Theatre Group have announced that Suzan-Lori Parks' ambitious...(More...)
Down in the gray-green gloom of the New York City subway system, anything can happen, and frequently does. A bit of hucksterism. Alms for the poor. Sometimes, even unsuspecting critics have to field questions from that rarest of birds, the black female playwright. Late one night in 1987, on the way ...(More...)
"One percent is theory and 99 percent is practice. It is the 'doing' that brings the many benefits and rewards of yoga." - Sri K. Pattabhi Jois
What do you do every day?
A few months ago, my yoga studio offered a 40-day challenge to its teachers and students. Each day for 40 days,...(More...)
It's only 2006, but Suzan-Lori Parks is already on track to be the century's most prolific playwright.
On Nov. 13, 2002 -- soon after winning the Pulitzer for "Topdog/Underdog" -- she began writing a play a day for 12 months. And beginning Nov. 13, 2006, the entire output of that year w...(More...)
When Bonnie Metzgar discovered the line of dialogue on her first read of the 365 plays her pal Suzan-Lori Parks wrote in 365 days, it burst forth a mantra:
"Right on ... pass it on."
"From that moment, the rest of our experience became about, 'Right on ... pass it on...(More...)
Tomorrow, the largest national collaboration in American theater history will launch Suzan-Lori Parks's yearlong play cycle, "365 Days/365 Plays."
In a huge grassroots effort, about 700 theaters and university groups have signed up to perform some of Parks's 365 short plays. Each will p...(More...)
Suzan-Lori Parks and Bonnie Metzgar are on the trip of a lifetime. The longtime friends and partners-in-crime have turned themselves into ambassadors of play, dual hosts at a party that will last an entire year.
Parks and Metzgar have cooked up a unique production concept for Parks's equally u...(More...)
One November morning in 2002, the American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks told her husband she was going to write a play a day for a whole year. "Yeah, baby," said her husband from the couch. "That sounds cool."
Parks' notion might have sounded cool, but it was hardly practical. Since becoming th...(More...)
In 2004, Pulitzer Prize%u2013winner Suzan-Lori Parks wrote one play a day. For this urban-influenced poetical interpreter of the black experience (Venus; and two adaptations of The Scarlet Letter%u2013In the Blood and Fuckin%u2019 A), the project was originally nothing more than a personal challenge...(More...)
Every single day for a year, no matter what else was happening in her life, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play.
Some are short, some are long, and at least one consists mostly of stage directions.
At the end of the year, she set the plays aside. Month...(More...)
As part of an extraordinary daily regimen for the theatrical palate, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks%u2019 365 Days/365 Plays national theater project, which will run the 365 plays Parks wrote in 2002 over the coming year all around the country, was inaugurated in San Francisco la...(More...)
When Marisela Barrera and her colleagues looked around at the San Antonio theater community, they saw a group of people who could do even more if they came together. After several discussions, the hub they felt they needed was born -- La Colectiva.
"The whole structure of it is that we're a c...(More...)
In November of 2002, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks got it in her head to pen a play for every day of the year. She didn't think much about how "365 Days/365 Plays" would be produced. She just followed her muse, writing miniature dramas about war and family, Johnny Cash and Barry White %u2014 whatever ...(More...)
Take a break from the fury of classes and join us at Reckers for an hour of creative %u201Cstreet%u201D/guerilla theatre! On Monday, November 20th from 12:30 %u2013 1:30 p.m, watch 7 plays in an hour. It%u2019s free! These performances are part of a national festival entitled 365 Days/365Plays.
(More...)
Saying there%u2019s a wrong way to do a cycle of Suzan-Lori Parks%u2019s 365 Days/365 Plays might be like saying there%u2019s a wrong way to eat a Reese%u2019s, so this is going to be tricky %u2026
To catch everyone up, Parks began writing a play for every day of the year in 2002, and the prod...(More...)
I don't know at what point the business of doing something eccentric over the course of one calendar year became fashionable, but these days it seems as if 365 days is the standard time necessary to accomplish anything worth talking about. In our culture of instant gratification, where attention def...(More...)
In 2002, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks gave herself the task of writing a play a day for a full year. Now theater companies throughout North America are taking a full year to stage the results: 365 very short scripts. The project's called "365 Days/365 Plays"; it launched...(More...)
Middletown, CT - It's not often that college thespians have the opportunity to discuss their work with one of the preeminent forces in American theater. The cast and production team of Wesleyan's "365 Days/365 Plays" festival were given just that opportunity last Tuesday at the '92 Theater.
MARFA %u2013 Suzan-Lori Parks was running up a gravelly hill on Pinto Canyon Road Friday afternoon. The Pulitzer prize-winning playwright was demonstrating how to outrun a bouncer, her name for the critical voice that guards, and sometimes shuts down, a writer%u2019s creative mind.
Park...(More...)
By day, Terence McFarland is known throughout the LA theatre community as the Executive Director of the LA Stage Alliance, a reputable non-profit service organization dedicated to building awareness, appreciation, and support for the performing arts in Greater LA. After leaving the fashion industry ...(More...)
Seventeen-year-old stage actor Joshua Gannon-Salomon and his mom, Kathleen Gannon, drove in from Cheshire Saturday to catch what may be the largest theater collaboration in national history.
In two small 900 Chapel St. storefronts facing the Green, New Haven Theater Company members perf...(More...)
Of course Suzan-Lori Parks is an amazing writer. I don%u2019t think anybody would dispute that. But this aside, I feel a connection to her work I%u2019m not sure I can put a finger on. I first became familiar with her in 2001, when, off for a semester from grad school to give birth to my daughter, I...(More...)
On Monday, Suzan-Lori Parks' lyrical fragments of condensed experience will open on street corners, parking lots, cafes, parks, libraries, playgrounds, community centers and theaters around the country.
COMING UP
SUZAN-LORI PARKS: 365 DAYS/365 PLAYS
WHERE: In Seattle, all ov...(More...)
It was nighttime, the summer of 2005, and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks was in the car with her longtime pal, producer Bonnie Metzgar. The pair was driving through the streets of Lafayette near Metzgar's home, partaking in two of their favorite pastimes: dreaming and scheming.
Parks' play...(More...)
Suzan-Lori Parks is awfully good at multitasking. The 42-year-old playwright is Taking time out from reading through the book galleys of her latest project, "365 Days/365 Plays," to talk on the phone from her Southern California house in Venice, interrupted by a magazine photographer showing up earl...(More...)
365 Plays/365 Days
It was an ambitious plan, in the extreme. And few expected she could bring it off.
That didn't stop the dauntless playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (a Pulitzer Prize winner for her Broadway drama, "Top Dog/Underdog") from writing a new play for every day of an ...(More...)
A MacArthur "genius" grant. A Pulitzer Prize for drama. A Broadway hit.
It was the spring of 2002 and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, nearing 40, had the world on a string. The woman behind "Topdog/Underdog" was a hot commodity, and theaters everywhere were drooling to have her next play.<...(More...)
Last week, Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks's new play premiered at Manhattan's Public Theater. And at L.A.'s Center Theatre. And at Austin's Groten Stage. Plus 11 other theaters around the country. If the Tonys, the Drama Desks, and the Voice's own Obies gave prizes for scheduling, organizati...(More...)
Can theater get any better than the kind that stops traffic?
The initial offerings in the "365 Days/365 Plays" national festival at the Acoma Center created a living, pulsing collaborative energy unlike anything this theater community has produced before.
Fifteen communitie...(More...)
Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks is one very busy playwright these days.
She spent the second full week in November crisscrossing the country, spending every day in a different city to kick off "365 Days, 365 Plays," a national festival producing all of the pieces she wrote in a yearlon...(More...)
ACT DOES THEATER OVER THE PHONE.
When a new Suzan-Lori Parks play comes to the D.C. area, local box-office hot lines ring off the hooks with calls from theatergoers clamoring for tickets. For the American Century Theater%u2019s production of seven of the playwright%u2019s shorts, howeve...(More...)
365 DAYS/365 PLAYS
Adventurous playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (Venus; Topdog/Underdog) had this crazy idea to write one play every day for an entire year. And starting in November, they are being produced (in various groupings and formats) by more than 600 theater companies around the country. Th...(More...)
