The Wake

Take a mental note of all the ways you keep track of yourself, the ways you record, tag, and publicize your life: MySpace, Flickr, your personal website, your blog. Consider who’s watching. Imagine filling a theater with the clique you share your digitized life with, the strangers, lovers, exes, friends, enemies, and weirdoes who access your online production of yourself.

In the minutes before Week 18 of Suzan-Lori Park’s 365 Days/365 Plays took the stage at the Suburban World Theater on Saturday, March 17th, I thought about the bars in Uptown, filled with St.Patty’s Day celebrants whose tipsy photos would be regurgitated onto the Internet in the morning. I thought about my own affinity for documenting myself through blogs and photo-sharing sights. I thought, as the show was about to begin, about lifelogging, which will be the next trend in obsessive life-documentation if the powers that haunt the corporate corridors at Microsoft have their way.

If the medium is the massage, I thought gloomily, we’re all being massaged into sameness. It was a thought that could’ve brought on a bought of teenage-grade angst, had the show not promptly begun.

Within minutes, sitting in the dark with strangers, I became happily entranced by an ancient medium still imbued with possibility.

365 Days/365 Plays is a project of stunning proportions: one play written each day for one year. The project is Pulitzer-prize winner Suzan-Lori Park’s. As the story goes, she sat down in November of 2002 and dedicated herself to writing a play a day for the next year. On November 13, 2006, three years to the day after the 365th play was complete, 365 National Festival began and will run until November 12, 2007. According to the official website (), over 600 theater companies, arts organizations and universities are involved in the festival so far. In each participating city is a network of 52 performing groups; each group will produce one week of the festival, so each city will see a full year of plays.

The University of Minnesota’s Theatre Arts program performed Week 18. Jason Ballweber, Nic Hager, Steve Hortsman, Samantha Johns (who also directed the performance), Carolyn Kopecky, Ryan Lear, Tom Lloyd, Alisa Mattson, Noah Rios, Nikki Schultz, and Xanthia Walker collaborated to interpret and perform Parks’ scripts.

The result was dreamy and referential, each day between March 12 and 18 a short, enigmatic play occasionally reminiscent of the spooky allegories in Hans Christian Anderson’s The Brothers Grimm. Take the first play, March 12: a hunched, big-eared troll hops fiendishly onto the stage, a wrinkled paper bag in his hands. He pauses near an empty chair and waits expectantly. And, as in fairy tails, a fair, young woman enters the scene. She approaches the chair, inspects its cleanliness, and primly sits. The troll startles her, almost frightens her away. Out of morbid curiosity, though, she resists running away as the troll ominously opens his paper bag. She squirms anxiously, prepared to be affronted with some awesomely grotesque specimen. Instead, the troll takes out of the bag a glittering tiara, which he places on the wary girl’s head, crowning her. She beams. End of scene.

March 16, “Opening Night,” was equally enigmatic. Following a brief scene satirizing the climax of Romeo and Juliet (Juliet stabs herself, begins to die, and sits up to starkly ask: Is this how it ends?), all nine performers take the stage as at the end of a performance, bowing and applauding for themselves. They are dressed oddly, as though for a variety show: one performer wears Western garb, another is in drag. They applaud and bow. End of story.

But not quite. As I learned after the performance while talking to Nikki Schultz, one of the performers, “Opening Night” references the play written for March 11. The group had to read beyond Week 18 when preparing their performance, tracing references and allusions.

For an audience who isn’t familiar with all 17 weeks of plays prior to Week 18, cryptic references may frustrate or confuse. Yet I found that they were a welcome abstraction, wonderfully complex compared to the transparency of daily blogs that read like lists.

Whether or not Parks intended 365 Days/365 Plays as a personal antidote to the glut of life documentation flooding the Internet, an original way to document her life, her project can certainly fill that role in today’s milieu. It is similar to and yet drastically different from something like a blog. Each play is personal and inextricably linked to her life, and yet each is written to be interpreted and personalized by others. The audience must be more intimate than an online venue would allow, gathering in a theater for a moment of suspended voyeurism.