Suzan-Lori Parks came up with a big idea composed of 365 little parts. She would write a play a day. For an entire year. “A daily meditation, a daily prayer celebrating the rich and strange process of a writing life.”

The LAT’s Christopher Reynolds explains:

Parks had never been one to let go of outlandish notions easily. At 39, she’d already won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize for drama. And as a devotee of yoga (with not one but two Sanskrit slogans tattooed on her left forearm), she loved the idea of making her writing into a ritual of daily devotion.

And so, on Nov. 13, 2002, Parks started writing, peppered the works with her usual rich language, alienated characters, biting humor, startling shifts in tone, and echoes of Hindu poetry and Greek tragedy. A year later she finished. None of the plays was longer than a few pages, yet memories of 9/11 were in there, and infanticide and weapons of mass destruction. So were William Tell, Glenn Gould, Abraham Lincoln at age 89, and the deaths of Gregory Hines, John Ritter and George Plimpton — who realizes on Sept. 26, while working a crossword puzzle in the afterlife, that Parks is writing a play about him.

The result, Reynolds says, “might be the largest American theater collaboration ever.”