Starting tonight and carrying through the next 12 months, Suzan-Lori Parks’s résumé is about to expand fiftyfold.

Tonight’s en masse world premiere of her “365 Days/365 Plays” will begin the largest collaborative theatre project in American history. Upward of 700 theatres operating out of 14 regional hubs will present a series of one-a-day plays that Ms. Parks wrote between November 2002 and November 2003. These 365 short, wildly varying plays revisit several of Ms. Parks’s past themes, offer tantalizing peeks at future works, and at times subvert the whole nature of theatergoing.

The New York hub, headquartered at the Public Theatre, will include dozens of companies in all five boroughs, ranging from the familiar (the New Group, New York Theatre Workshop) to the esoteric (Robot Vs. Dinosaur, the Bronx’s Pregones Theatre). The festival kicks off tonight at the Public with performances of the first seven plays at 6:30 and again at 9 p.m. (In between, Ms. Parks will sign copies of the published versions of “365 Days/365 Plays,” which Theatre Communications Group is also releasing today.) Other viewing options nationwide include the mayor’s office in Seattle, a nursing home in Atlanta, and a bridge in Austin, Texas.

Plays are usually not published prior to their first production, and it’s almost paradoxical that a codified version exists right from the start, given the explosion of creativity that it’s generating across the country. Everyone has to do the same plays the same week, sequentially. Beyond that, “they have to be respectful of the text,” said Ms. Parks, whose “Topdog/Underdog” made her the first and only African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. “Whatever that means to them. People really are rising to the occasion, like,‘Wow, I can do anything? Oh, boy!’ And then some people have come back and said, ‘My theater doesn’t do plays from bridges. Is that OK? Is that allowed? If we just do it in a theater with seats and everything?’

“There’ll be, like, hundreds of ways to do it,” she continued. “It’s trippy, right? But that’s the idea. The trippiness is contagious. A little window of possibility opens up in your mind. It’s not just about theater and all that and what theater can be — it’s just about anything in your life. Suddenly, like, whoa! Your life is a little more expansive and possible, you know?”

While she embarked on her yearlong writing project, Ms. Parks also taught at CalArts, wrote a screenplay for Oprah Winfrey, mounted her “Scarlet Letter” homage “F***ing A” at the Public, and went on a book tour to support her novel “Getting Mother’s Body.” As these other projects took precedence, the 365 plays went into a drawer.

They didn’t come out again until she visited longtime friend Bonnie Metzgar in the summer of 2005 in Denver, where Ms. Metzgar is associate artistic director of Curious Theatre Company. “When Bonnie came over, she said, ‘What about “365?”‘ I said, ‘Well, I did ’em.’ She said, ‘Now we gotta do ’em!'” In addition to her positions at Curious and as a playwriting professor at Brown University, Ms. Metzgar had also worked with a nationwide theatre consortium called the National New Play Network. These connections were crucial in assembling the ludicrously ambitious enterprise beginning tonight in Alaska, Minneapolis, and a dozen other places.

While attending all 365 plays is by no means compulsory, a year-long “story” of sorts does emerge, according to both women. “You feel the time, feel the … spirit of different seasons acting on Suzan-Lori and on the characters,” Ms. Metzgar said. The deaths of people like Barry White and Carol Shields are referenced along the way, along with other specific dates. “There’s a Santa play,” Ms. Parks said. “There’s a Valentine’s Day play called ‘Revolver Lover.’ There’s a 9/11 play, which I actually wrote on the ninth of November … but it’s 9/11 in my head because I write the date before the month.”

Despite its extremely formalized origin, “365 Days/365 Plays” undergoes a sort of willful entropy in terms of its presentational style near the end. In one play, “Talk Back,” the audience gives questions to the playwright. “The playwright, as played by an actor or series of actors, is invited to answer questions like ‘So what made you want to write?'” Ms. Parks said. “It’s an opportunity for them to do what I’ve been doing for years, putting mouths into the words of a stranger!” Another segment, “Blank Before the World,” Ms. Parks said, “is a blank space, and then there’s the end.”

But for Ms. Parks, “365 Days/365 Plays” may be just the beginning. “Ideas just come to me all the time,” she said. And she seemed unconcerned about reusing any of these 365 ideas in the future. “I put ’em all in with the feeling that most of them are seeds for redwood trees,” she said. “But I put them in anyway — I can go back and make bigger plays out of them.”

For Ms. Parks, “the act of writing is the great joy. The production is like the icing on the gravy. That’s what my agent says: ‘the icing on the gravy.'”

Information on all New York events can be found at publictheater.org/365. The play of the day will be posted on 365days365plays.com, though as of November 12, the listing was incomplete.