Parks’ discipline, devotion, love behind 365 plays

By MEGAN WILDE

MARFA – 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’s creative mind.

Parks was in town to see her play cycle, 365 Days 365 Plays, part of a nationwide festival which was performed at Goode Crowley Theater each evening last week. Parks came to Marfa from Venice, California, where she and her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher, have lived for the past seven years and are now hoping to leave.

During the drive down FM 2810, Parks said even though she hates driving in Los Angeles, she loves driving in a truck through the West Texas scenery. Odessa was Parks’ home for a few years when she was a child and the Army sent her father to Vietnam. The flat scrubby oil-field town where her grandmother and mother grew up made a deep impression on her in between her father’s military relocations along the east coast and Germany.

Now 42 years old and traveling to lectures and 365 Days 365 Plays performances across the country, Parks was glad to be back in West Texas. She squealed at the sight of windmills, cows, javelinas and blond grass on the way down Pinto Canyon Road.

Her dramatization of outrunning a bouncer along the unpaved section of the road was part of a larger discussion on writing. Some bouncers are lost in thought and slow to move, she explained, so they can be outpaced by writing quickly. Others can be persuaded to keep quiet until it’s time to edit, when a bouncer’s criticisms are useful.

The former California Institute of the Arts professor believes that 98 percent of writing depends on learning to control one’s bouncer and manage one’s personality. Parks became an expert at this while writing 365 Days 365 Plays. On November 13, 2002, Parks decided to write a play a day for a year. To do so, she couldn’t let her bouncer’s criticisms get in the way.

“To write a play a day,” she said, “you have to let him go. Dismiss him. Send him on a long vacation.”

Without that flow of internal criticism, Parks adopted a principal in her writing that she calls “radical inclusion.”

“Every idea is welcome, which is a huge change because ordinarily you’re much more selective,” she said. “Normally it’s ‘I’m writing and only quality thoughts are allowed in the door. Only quality thoughts!’ Well, if you’re writing a play a day, you have to take whoever is there. ‘Hey you, next. Hey you, you look kind of flimsy. So what! Sit down. You’re the next person in the play. You’re the next subject for the play.’”

Some days though, Parks said no ideas showed up when she sat down to write. Then the project took on a meditative quality.

“It happened a couple of times,” she said. “There was a play called Going Through the Motions and I sat there and… nothing. And I thought, Well, I’m going to go through the motions. So I wrote at the top of the page ‘Going Through the Motions,’ and I thought, Oh, that’s a good title for a play.”

“See what happens when just you let in anything?” she continued. “You accept the fact you have no ideas. You accept the fact that all I’m going to do today is go through the motions.”

This caught the attention of actor David Patrick Kelly when he read Going Through the Motions during an early workshop of Parks’ plays in New York.

“He said, ‘It’s such a beautiful play because I think of you sitting there and all you had was the commitment to write a play a day. All you had was your practice,’” Parks said.

Maintaining that commitment to write a play every day came naturally to Parks, who said her parents were always impressed by her discipline.

“I realize I am a very obsessive-compulsive kind of person. Very focused,” she said. “I used to do things like cross-country running and I always wanted to be an ultra marathoner. I don’t think my knees or my Achilles tendons would have cooperated. But in my mind I’m an ultra marathoner. I love to run across the desert in my mind. I have that basic nature.”

Producing a play every day took more discipline than simply sitting down to write. Parks refers the experience of writing the 365 project as a “walk around a sacred mountain.” That meditative devotion to her daily task shows a spiritual discipline, which comes across in the way people respond to the plays.

Parks said many viewers have commented that the plays seem like they were written for their community. Here in Marfa, audience members commented that plays like Horse and Rider worked perfectly set in Far West Texas.

“It’s a very spiritual act, writing these plays. When you’re thinking of God you’re thinking of everybody,” she said. “You’re thinking of everybody because you’re thinking of the thing that thinks of everybody all the time. So, sure, when a piece of writing hits the spot it feels like it was written for you, because that’s what good writing is.”

Parks’ love of writing was a driving force behind the 365 project, and the plays convey that love as well.

“I just love writing,” she said. “I knew I was saying thank you to writing by writing these.”

When she watched the plays and enjoyed the community potluck afterward in Marfa Thursday night, she had an insight into what the plays are about.

“Seeing the whole community come together to celebrate, it’s like Thanksgiving every day. That’s what it felt like last night, ‘Oh, this is a Thanksgiving feast in Marfa,’” she said.

She imagined similar Thanksgiving celebrations happening all over the country at the dozens of theaters producing her plays this year.

“For me, watching it, it is about spreading love,” she said. “I sat there last night and I’m like, Yep, it is about spreading love.”