A Year of Plays Winds Down with Two Weeks at Columbia

Given Columbia’s wide variety of schools and programs, finding a project that unifies the different aspects of the community can be challenging. However, those involved in the production of 365 Days/365 Plays have found a unique mechanism for building unlikely bridges.

In November 2002, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks began the process of writing an original play every day for one year as a daily meditation on the artistic life. The resulting play cycle, 365 Days/365 Plays, has inspired a type of theatrical relay race. The festival—which began on November 13, 2006 and will continue until November 12, 2007—invites various groups across the country to produce a week’s worth of plays in its own style.

The Columbia theater community is an official participant in 365U, the university network’s version of the festival. The production is a collaborative effort of the Barnard Theatre Department and Columbia School of the Arts, and so they will produce two weeks worth of plays, for the days from October 15 through October 28. In addition, they will be performing the “3 Constants,” which Parks wrote to be performed with any combination of the plays. Performances will be on the nights of October 18 through October 20.

While much of the publicity for the production cites the location of the festival as the Minor Latham Playhouse, this isn’t completely accurate. Directors of each play were asked to choose a location for their performance in and around Milbank Hall. Some of the plays will be performed in the courtyard, others in a stairwell, the basement, or even in a closet. The audience will be divided into groups and led from one performance to the next.

On her vision for the project, Parks wrote, “The aim is radical inclusion. Open your arms a little wider than usual.” In keeping with this ideal, the Barnard/Columbia production includes around 30 actors, 10 tour guides, and an assortment of directors, coordinators, and overseers, including artistic director Sandra Goldmark.
While most of the actors are Barnard and Columbia undergraduates, the directors include Barnard students, Barnard alumnae, School of the Arts directors and playwrights, and School of the Arts alumnae.

Not only has the project helped those involved forge new connections within the community, it also connects the Barnard/Columbia theater community with others all over the nation. On September 27, National Coordinator David Myers and Public Theater Artistic Associate Maria Goyanes discussed the project with members of the theater department. “It was fun to hear more about how it relates to what other people were doing,” Goldmark said. Myers shared the creative approaches that others have taken, such as one director who cooked a meal for each play and served it to the audience for the performance.

Besides community building, another goal of the festival is “pushing everyone to work outside their comfort zones,” as described on the official Web site for the project, www.365days365plays.com. This resonates with Goldmark, whose area of expertise is costume and set design, not artistic direction. “It’s been very fun and a challenge for me to see what it’s like to wear a slightly different hat. There are a lot of people doing this who are wearing slightly different hats,” Goldmark said.

Not surprisingly for a project of such size and ambition, other challenges have arisen. “What I see as one of the fun challenges of this thing is we have these 17 disparate plays but we are also trying to make one evening of theater,” says Goldmark. In an attempt to achieve cohesiveness, all of the directors were given some guidelines and common threads to consider.

“I really want it to feel like an evening of theater where you see these little slices of very different styles, very different shows, all different people, all different points of view, but that it adds up to something, adds up to a sense, hopefully of what the Barnard/Columbia theater community is,” Goldmark said.