Abstract

Four plays by playwright/theatre-maker Caridad Svich (OBIE for Lifetime Achievement) – The Hour of All Things, The Breath of Stars, Upon the Fragile Shore and Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge) – explore the rough and necessary waters of citizenship under the effects of globalization and threads of human connection across multiple geographic landscapes. The Hour of All Things tells the story of an ordinary person trying to figure out how to take a stand against systemic oppression; The Breath of Stars is a radical, atomized reconfiguration of Shakespeare’s The Tempest seen through the lens of global capitalism in the digital age. Upon the Fragile Shore spans the stories of individuals in eighteen countries to focus on human-made environmental and human tragedies and their effects. Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge) looks at the tough and tender lives of immigrants and their adult children in Detroit as they struggle to relocate the power of myth in their everyday lives. With an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline, Blair Baker, Neil Scharnick, Carla Melo and Sherrine Azab, this wide-ranging, daring collection of plays refuses to settle the complex and thorny questions of existence.

Caridad Svich received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and NNPN Continued Life Fund rolling world premiere for Guapa, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on Isabel Allende’s novel. She has won the National Latino Playwriting Award (sponsored by Arizona Theatre Company) twice, most recently in 2013 for her play Spark. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times, including the year 2012 for Magnificent Waste. Among her other key works are 12 Ophelias, Any Place But Here, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues and Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable). She has also adapted for the stage novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julia Alvarez and Mario Vargas Llosa, and has translated nearly all of Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays as well as work from Mexico, Cuba and Spain. Three of her plays are collected as JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and Other Plays (Intellect, UK and University of Chicago Press, 2016). Seven of her plays are published in Instructions for Breathing and Other Plays (Seagull Books and University of Chicago Press, 2014). Five of her plays re-imagining ancient Greek tragedies are published in Blasted Heavens (Eyecorner Press, University of Denmark, 2012). She has edited several books of theatre and performance, among them Audience Revolution and Innovation in Five Acts (both for Theatre Communications Group). She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists, associate editor of Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge, UK), contributing editor of TheatreForum and founder of NoPassport theatre alliance and press (www.nopassport.org).