This week, the University is taking part in the largest theater collaboration in U.S. history. The production of “365 Days/365 Plays” by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks officially began on Monday, Jan. 5 with an opening ceremony in the CFA Theater.
In commemoration of the spirit of creativity and diversity of Parks’ project, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies Gina Ulysse collaborated with a group of about 20 students in an opening ceremony presentation dealing with perceptions of race and race relations.
“Professor Ulysse told us to go back to a moment in the classroom when we felt we had had to edit ourselves, or not speak,” said participant Elana Baurer ’09. “This was an opportunity to release all that, which was why the presentation was called ‘Unfiltered.’”
Erin Goldstein ’09 also felt that the process allowed people to be very open with one another.
“It started with a free-write and then we all went around in a circle and shared our thoughts to the rest of the group,” Goldstein said. “It was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever been through.”
Starting in November 2002, Parks dedicated herself to writing a play every day for an entire year. Part of the reason these plays were not immediately released was that Parks did not want them performed before a traditional, and limited, audience.
“The prospect of the world premiere, where one theater gets the rights to show a play first, really did not seem to suit the text or the spirit behind the text,” said Bonnie Metzgar, one of the co-producers of the 365 Days/365 Plays National Festival. “For a while, Suzan-Lori put the plays away in a drawer. What we did was to take the idea of a world premier as all-encompassing: how to break the plays into as many pieces as possible and literally include the world?”
Parks’ plays fully emerged in November 2006 with the start of the festival, which involves 52 universities and over 700 other organizations across the country. The University is participating in 365 Days/365 Plays thanks to the efforts of Nikhil Melnechuk ’07 and Jessica Posner ’09, who spent much time organizing the campus performances and thinking of ways to involve the community.
“We started with the idea of theater as a frame of mind for our daily lives,” Posner told the audience at the opening ceremony. “What is a play? We started to think of plays as anything.”
Posner and Melnechuk chose six students, from among the nearly 60 who auditioned, to perform the plays, which will be featured seven times a day at varying locations on campus and in downtown Middletown. All of the performances are free of charge.
“We knew that we needed a very diverse crew for this project. We sent out an all-campus announcement for actors, directors, dancers,” Melnechuck said. “We were looking for people with incredible talent, who could perform anywhere and draw a crowd.”
The final crew consists of Michael Chandler ’08, Jennifer Celestin ’07, Maya Kazan ’09, Garrett Larribas ’07, Jermaine Lewis ’09 and Carter Smith ’09.
“There were eight of us collaborating on these plays, and there were so many ideas stemming from these short plays, some only two lines long,” Melnechuk said. “The tendency was to stray from the text, but the actors kept telling me to go back to the text and that it would have meaning, which is one of the best things I’ve gotten out of this.”
Both Posner and Melnechuck see the festival as a way of opening up theater to a larger audience.
“I would love it if people would just get into it, take the basis provided by the plays and run with it,” Posner said. “This is a chance for absolutely everyone to get involved, even if you’ve never been in theater before.”
Rebecca Rugg, the other festival producer and the project archivist, exemplified the creativity and openness of Parks’ idea by presenting a slide show of how other theater groups had interpreted and enacted her plays. The Zach Scott Theater in Austin, TX performed one of her pieces on a pedestrian bridge. A troupe in New Haven, CT chose an empty storefront window as their stage, taking advantage of the crowds during Thanksgiving week to reach out to a large number of people.
“Suzan-Lori leaves lots of room for actors to make up things, add words, and interpret,” Rugg said, “It’s very different from the way we usually conceive of theater.”
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