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Burgess asked Brochman if they were in business or not. Brochman replied they were.

‘‘You never know, huh?” asked Burgess, of Takoma Park.

‘‘Dang straight. You. Never. Know,” replied Brochman, of Silver Spring.

And that quickly, the play was finished.

Mary Resing, director of the Active Cultures Theatre, which is participating in Parks’ 365 Days⁄365 Plays Festival, asked the five actors at the rehearsal to consider in what kind of business the men were involved and if they knew each other.

Burgess said he thought they could know each other, or they would have no reason to sit together. As for the business, that could refer to the business of life, he suggested.

‘‘I think he needs to be secure,” said Kirsten Benjamin, another of the actors. ‘‘That’s why he put socks on his hands, like little kids who scratch themselves when they have the chicken pox.”

Resing said she liked the idea, but she had thought the men were going to commit a crime. Whatever, they weren’t in any hurry to do their business, judging from how slowly Brochman had to look around and speak his last line, she said.

Then the group considered the men were prostitutes before rereading the script twice, pretending the men were first spies and then set up as part of a dating service.

‘‘I think they’re two oddballs. Their friends thought, ‘I’ll never fix these two up,’” said Resing, who lives in University Park.

So what did the group decide? Well, for that answer, you’ll have to attend the performance this week and find out. The group left that play alone to rehearse the next one, ‘‘The War to End All Wars is Almost Over (Maybe it will go on forever but we hope not, right?)”

Writing a play every day

Active Cultures is one of several theater groups in the across the country to perform a week’s worth of Parks’ plays however they choose to in her 365 Days⁄365 Days Festival, which began in November 2006 and concludes this November. The plays can be done in any venue and done one at a time or on a compressed schedule, Resing said.

Each theater company across the company performs the same group of plays during the weeks in which they are assigned.

Parks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, had the idea in 2002 to write a play a day for a year, and the plays in the festival are the result of that effort.

‘‘Death of a Salesman” these plays are not. They’re more like short, existential vignettes, Resing said.

‘‘The plays reflect what she was thinking that day,” she said. ‘‘Suzan-Lori Parks is an extremely courageous writer.”

Part of that courage is her letting go of the plays so the companies can perform their own interpretations, Resing said. Parks has been to some, but not all, of the productions.

A group in the District performed the plays at a Metro stop, and one in Dallas did it on a barge, Resing said.

‘‘It’s about theater anywhere there’s an audience,” she said.

Out of the Black Box Theatre Company, which premiered its first play in 2005, is performing its set of plays in September, said Betsy Delaney, artistic director.

At first, Delaney expressed some skepticism about the project when she heard about it from a member of her board of directors.

‘‘I thought, ‘Maybe that’s not a good idea,’” she said. ‘‘Then I thought, ‘Nope, that’s exactly what we want to do.”

Other Prince George’s groups that participated included Bowie State University’s theater company in February, Laurel’s Venus Theater in late March and the University of Maryland College Park’s theater company in April.

Active Cultures, which is about eight months old, got involved because Resing, its artistic director, knew Parks through Resing’s service as director of development with the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in the District. Some friends told Resing she should participate in the festival so she connected with Parks.

Doing the plays is in line with both companies’ mission of creating theater for local audiences, Delaney and Resing said.

‘‘It’s very exciting. I think it’s very cool to think every week it’s by a different theater group” across the country, Delaney said.

Keeping it short

The actors and Resing spent more time discussing the plays than it took to perform them. But several said they felt the material freed them for that reason. They connected with Resing through e-mail after an audition.

By not having much direction in terms of their characters’ backstory or set and setting, they can interpret the plays as they see fit, said actor Anne Coventry, a 15-year-old from Bethesda.

‘‘It should be interesting to see people’s reactions,” she said.

Others said they felt the pull of community theater and how important getting the public to see the plays is. Burgess compared the concept to ‘‘Shakespeare in the Park” festivals.

‘‘In an open setting with people not into theater, you can get those people into theater,” he said.

Benjamin is the veteran of this group, having done 365 Days⁄365 Plays productions with Odyssey Productions in Week 10 in January and Arena Stage a couple weeks ago.

‘‘You’re bringing theater to people who might not get to see it otherwise,” she said of her reasons for participating in three companies’ productions. ‘‘I like to do any new works, which is why Suzan-Lori Parks is great.”

And in bringing their own interpretations, ideas can come from anywhere, including popular culture and religion.

As the Active Cultures actors read ‘‘WAVE (The everything in the water),” they tried to determine the teacher’s background and who the student was. The two stand looking at the ocean as the teacher asks the student what she sees. Water and waves, she replies.

The teacher wants to know who’s making the waves, and the student thinks her dad is. But her dad is ill and that day is his birthday. Finally, the teacher helps her realize ‘‘the everything” makes the waves and it’s useless to try to fight the waves because the waves will win every time.

When Resing asked the group to think of who the teacher was, Burgess replied the teacher was educating about the Force from the Star Wars movies. Picking up on that theme, Resing said the teacher was Obi-Wan Kenobi.

‘‘It’s like Daoism. You’re one with nature. Dad’s alive, but necessarily functioning. He’s in a coma,” Anne said.

After the group determined the sea was death and fate couldn’t be fought, so the student should accept hers, Anne added, ‘‘It’s part of the circle of life.”

E-mail Jennifer Donatelli at jdonatelli@gazette.net.

IF YOU GO

365 Days⁄365 Plays

When: 6 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Where: Bladensburg Waterfront Park, 4601 Annapolis Road, Bladensburg

Admission: Free

The plays: Active Cultures Theatre plans to perform eight of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ works as part of her 365 Plays in 365 Days: El Fenix, Are We in Business or What? (a man gets ready, just in case), The War to End All Wars is Almost Over (Maybe it will go on forever but we hope not, right?), WAVE (the everything in the water), The Red Blanket (violence turns to peace), The Presidential Race Circa 1972 (my old political views), The Script (the palmistry play), and The First Constant (Remember Who You Are).

Black Box Theatre

When: Sept. 24-30.

The plays: Out of the Black Box Theatre Company plans to perform the following of Parks’ plays: Play (Condemned Version), Again (Perfect), Reel (Slice of the Fishing Life), A Play for George Plimpton (and for John Ritter), Selling Out, Splitsville, The Worst (A Sausage Play), and Goodbye New York (How to Leave).