THE SHOW-WOMAN.

Down in the gray-green gloom of the New York City subway system, anything can happen, and frequently does. A bit of hucksterism. Alms for the poor. Sometimes, even unsuspecting critics have to field questions from that rarest of birds, the black female playwright. Late one night in 1987, on the way home from an event at Franklin Furnace, an avant-garde arts center, the writer and theatre critic Alisa Solomon was riding the subway, minding her own business, when a young black woman approached her. "I saw you at the theatre, so I was kinda hoping I could ask you a question," she said, and sat down next to Solomon, who described the encounter in the Village Voice two years later. The woman leaned in "uncomfortably close," before adding, "I'm trying to ask anyone who might know. I'm a playwright. Do you know where I can send my scripts? They're kind of unconventional."

That young woman--Suzan-Lori Parks--has since become renowned for her audacity, both on the page and in the world. The author of nine full-length plays, most of which are taught at drama schools across the country, and one of the founders of a wave of multilayered, historically aware, and linguistically complicated theatre, she aims to defeat what she calls "the Theatre of Schmaltz"--"the play-as-wrapping-paper-version-of-hot-newspaper-headline." Parks was the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama--for her 2001 play, "Topdog / Underdog"--after having been short-listed for "In the Blood," her 1999 reimagining of "The Scarlet Letter." A writer who crosses cultural boundaries, as well as social ones, she has had her work produced everywhere, from the smallest avant-garde stages to Broadway. Her voice is both idiosyncratic and eerily familiar, one of few in the popular theatre to fully exploit the power of spoken black English. (A typical passage from one of her plays reads like this: "In my day my motherud say 16:15 and there wernt no question that it was 16:15 her time. Thuh time helpin tuh tell you where you oughta be where you oughta be lookin and whatcha oughta be lookin at.")

Perhaps Parks's willingness to, as she might put it, "show her ass" without apology is something she picked up from one of her heroes, the singer Josephine Baker, whose famous attitude she wrote about in a 1995 essay:

Legend has it that when Josephine Baker hit Paris in the '20s, she "just wiggled her fanny and all the French fell in love with her." . . . [But] there was a hell of a lot behind that wiggling bottom. Check it: Baker was from America and left it; African-Americans are on the bottom of the heap in America; we are at the bottom on the bottom, practically the bottom itself, and Baker rose to the top by shaking her bottom.

Like Baker, Parks, who was nicknamed LedgeButt as a child, believes in making use of what you've got, even if all you've got is a belief in yourself. Much in demand as a kind of inspirational speaker on the college lecture circuit, she told me last winter, "I love my lecture tours. I get up onstage. I have my stack of books and a glass of water and a microphone. No podium, no distance between me and the audience, and I just talk to people and get all excited and tell a lot of jokes, and sing some songs, and read from my work and remind people how powerful they are and how beautiful they are."

In September, she taught a master class in drama at Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago. Seated before a small crowd of future playwrights, in an army-green miniskirt, Parks summed up her philosophy this way: "The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come." She paused. "Faith is the big deal," she said.

Parks's faith in her most ambitious project to date, "365 Days / 365 Plays," was the driving force behind a meeting that she called one morning last January. The project, a yearlong, nationwide staging of a series of very short plays that Parks wrote in the course of a year, will launch on November 13th, and will involve nearly seven hundred theatres, in more than thirty cities; back in January, however, it was still in the early stages of development.