Theater und Schule: Suzan-Lori Park’s Daily Plays

Praxiskolleg Ringvorlesung 19/20
„Theater und Schule“

In November of 2002, the year she won the Pulitzer Prize for ‚Topdog/Underdog‘, Suzan-Lori Parks decided to write one play per day for an entire year. Four years later, these short plays, published as ‚365 Days/365 Plays‘, were performed over the course of a year in what may be the largest and most elaborate theatrical premiere ever (New York Times, 10 Nov 2006). The 365 Festival involved and connected more than 700 theatres (NYT, 10 Nov 2006). While Parks compares the process of writing a play per day with meditation and prayer, she emphasises the communal experience of staging this large cycle of plays across an entirenation. [T]he 365 Festival is not building a new community, Park maintains, [i]t is revealing a community where it already exists in theatres both grand and modest, in schoolrooms, storefronts, nursing homes and alleyways (365 Days, 401). Considering the ritual and communal aspects of ‚365 Days‘, it is intriguing but not surprising that Parks returned to the habit of writing a play per day during the particularly divisive time that is Donald Trump´s presidency. In ‚100 Plays for the First Hundred Days‘ (2018), Parks´ grapples with and comments on Trumps first hundred days in office one day and one play at a ti me. This lecture considers the ways in which Parkssconception of theatre as ritual and communal experience in ‚365 Days/365 Plays‘ and ‚100 Plays‘ is capable of restoring to theatre some of its political power.

Referent

Dr. Simon Trüb ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Englischen Seminar der Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg.

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Bericht zur Veranstaltung: “Dr. Simon Trüb: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Daily Plays”

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