365 Days/365 Plays
by Suzan-Lori Parks
Performed February 10-11, 2007
at the Santa Monica Pier
365 Days/365 Plays is the largest theater festival in American history, taking place from November 2006 to November 2007 in 16 cities across the country. For one year beginning in 2002, author Suzan-Lori Parks wrote one short play a day. Center Theatre Group, the largest and most prestigious theater presenter in the western States, is organizing the Los Angeles portion of the festival in partnership with nearly four dozen theater groups and artists throughout the L.A. area.
Empire of Teeth presented nine plays as site-specific performances on the historic and popular Santa Monica Pier. The texts by Parks simultaneously function as theater works, allegories, and visceral expressions of the crisis of American culture and modern society. By performing in a popular public location, filled with shops, restaurants, and entertainment, Empire of Teeth seeks to place cutting-edge theater in the context of the “real world,” which the content of the plays are commenting upon.
Cast members include Franc Baliton, Carla Melo, Michael Morrissey, Nurit Siegel, and Michael Sakamoto.
Suzan-Lori Parks (Playwright) is a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist whose plays include the 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Topdog/Underdog, Fucking A, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 Obie Award for Best New American Play), The American Play, Venus (Public Theater, 1996 Obie Award), The Death Of The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and In The Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), among others. Her work is the subject of the PBS Film "The Topdog/Underdog Diaries." She is an alumnae of New Dramatists and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was also the recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts (Drama) for 1996 and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. Her work for film and television includes "Girl 6" (directed by Spike Lee) and the adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” for Oprah Winfrey Presents. Her first novel, Getting Mother's Body, is published by Random House. She is currently writing the book for the Ray Charles musical (for the film producers of "Ray"). Parks is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundaton Genius Award.
Special thanks to the Santa Monica Pier Restoration Corporation and the Santa Monica City Cultural Affairs Division.
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