EASTON, Pa.(www.lafayette.edu), October 4, 2007 — Megan Kaesshaefer ’08 (Philadelphia, Pa.) is majoring in English with a minor in theater studies. She was one of 11 student directors for the College Theater production of 365 Days/365 Plays by Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks. The following is a first-person account of her experiences.

This past week I had the unusual privilege of directing a play from one of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’s latest theatrical endeavors; 365 Days/365 Plays. Begun in November of 2002, Parks had the idea to write one play a day for a full year. The finished product, a collection of very short, very funny, avant-garde works, has generated a buzz across the country. The excitement stems not from the plays themselves, but from a nation-wide project, “The 365 Days/365 Plays Project” created in an effort to perform them. Over 700 venues have been recruited to participate including major regional theatres, smaller arts ensembles, and universities and colleges like Lafayette.

Each location is assigned a week’s worth of plays, and the play is performed the day it was written. For example, her first play called “Start Here,” written on Nov. 13, 2002, was performed on Nov. 13, 2006. In Lafayette’s case, due to the brevity of the plays, the eleven plays assigned to us were performed in a collective show which ran for four consecutive nights. The idea is that every day for a year, Suzan-Lori Parks’s work would be performed in a different space, with a different cast, directed and acted using different approaches.

As a member of Professor Michael O’Neill’s directing class, I was one of eleven students assigned a play and given the task of directing it. The challenge? There were many. For one, my play, entitled “Splitsville,” is approximately fifteen seconds long. People would ask, “what’s your play about?” and, “what’s the plot? What are the characters like?” I would attempt an answer; “Well, it requires five actors (one being a hulking male clad in a black tutu and tights,) to stand on stage together and strike various poses, or “splits” in about the time it takes to tie your shoe.” “That’s it?” they’d respond. That was it. But again, we’re talking about avant-garde, comedy, and unconventional drama. So no, that wasn’t it.

Parks made it clear that there were no stipulations about how these plays should be performed, so it was really up to us, the directors, to interpret what we read and then translate it to the audience. Some of the material we were given included an actor running around the stage like a headless chicken trying to pile toy soldiers onto a scale, a man pulling another out of the sea with a fishing pole, and an exchange between the late George Plimpton and John Ritter over a crossword puzzle. The outrageous list goes on, and despite each play’s idiosyncrasies, I was amazed at the continuity that emerged after watching the show in its entirety on opening night.

It would be an impossibility to pigeonhole each one of these small works into a class of its own, but what I walked away with after watching the show for myself was more of a commentary on human behavior, the psychology of interaction, and an over-arching criticism of the current war America has forged in Iraq. The final play places Uncle Sam under a spotlight as he counts down the number of soldiers killed in Iraq (the figure increased every night) until his voice is engulfed and lost in the wind.

This being my first directing experience, I learned a significant amount. Overall, I would say this was a highly successful endeavor; the reception was great, we sold out a few nights and most importantly, we contributed to a nation-wide project devoted to the arts. I think the fact that Lafayette undertook this project (the license fee was $1, how could they say no?) is perhaps a step toward increased support for the arts. Hopefully, it also helped students to realize that theater is not restricted to Broadway musicals or one act plays; it is expressive, functional art that takes many malleable forms.