Caridad Svich Papers

Caridad Svich is an award-winning playwright, director, actor, composer, translator, and educator. She is considered one of the most prolific contemporary Latinx American playwrights. Svich was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. on July 30, 1963 to Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents. She notes that her frequent moves from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, New York, and California among other travels and “living between cultures” has “instilled a nomadic strain” in her, which “has become an inevitable part of [her] writing vision.” She says that, “visions of migration (both physical and spiritual) dominate the plays, which have become, in turn, documents of internal diasporas. As a playwright, songwriter, editor and translator living between many cultures, including inherited ones, the idea of departure has always been not only an actual or metaphorical basis for writing the work.” In fact, during her career Svich continued to travel throughout the United States and internationally to places as varied as Traverse Theater in Edinburgh and the Royal Court Theater and Paines Plough Theater in London, Greece, Argentina and the US-Cuba Writer's Conference in Havana.

Svich earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1985 and her Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, San Diego in theatre-playwriting in 1988. In 1988, she became a student of María Irene Fornés’ Latino playwriting workshop in New York, followed by playwright residencies at INTAR, Theater Communications Group, Lake Placid Institute for the Arts, and a 7-year residency with the New Dramatists in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, N.Y. In 1990, Svich directed a production of But There Are Fires for INTAR Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory Festival. In 2000, she acted in a production of Scar at Perishable Theater in Providence, Rhode Island. She also created the Original Score for Alchemy of Desire/ Dead Man's Blues (Text with Songs) which was performed at the Hal B. Wallis Theater in Evanston Illinois and William and Mary Theater in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Svich has written over forty full-length plays and fifteen translations as well as other short works. She says that “Explorations of wanderlust, dispossession, biculturalism, bilingualism, construction of identity, and the many different emotional terrains that can be inhabited onstage form the basis of my plays and other writing projects.” Her full-length works produced include: Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge), Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues (a play with songs), A Little Betrayal Among Friends, Any Place But Here, Archipelago, Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, The Booth Variations, Brazo Gitano [text with songs], The Breath of Stars, Corazon Eterno (always in my heart), DE TROYA, Fugitive Pieces (a play with songs), FUEL, GERTIE AND ALICE BY THE SEA, Guapa, Hide Sky, The House of the Spirits/La Casa de los Espiritus, In the time of the Butterflies/En el tiempo de las mariposas, Instructions for Breathing, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), JARMAN (all this maddening beauty), Love in the Time of Cholera/El Amor en los Tiempos de Colera, The Labyrinth of Desire, Magnificent Waste, The Orphan Sea, RED BIKE, Sanctuary (American Psalm), SPARK, Thrush (a play with slaughter songs), TOWN HALL, The Tropic of X, Trouble in Kind, Turn the Dark Up, Bow Down, This is a Hymn, Twelve Ophelias (a play with broken songs), Prodigal Kiss [text with songs], The Way of Water, Wreckage, Upon the Fragile Shore. She has also adapted for the stage novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Alvarez and Jose Leon Sanchez, and has radically reconfigured works from Wedekind, Euripides, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Her plays have been directed by Annie Castledine, Maria Irene Fornes, Lisa Peterson, Neel Keller, William Carden, Nick Philippou, Annie Dorsen, Katie Pearl, Stephen Wrentmore, Daniella Topol and Jose Zayas, among many others.

About Svich’s work, Lillian Manzor writes: “The themes, styles and concerns that shape Svich’s dramaturgy are: a critique of the American Dream and a constant search for home through the prism of diaspora and migration; the mixing of rituals and traditional cultural elements from the Americas with global pop culture; obtuse treatment of love and desire; and a poetic and nonrealistic use of language and musical elements.Svich’s characters survive by becoming “professional” nomads. Like their creator, they find themselves at the intersection of identities. As hybrids or transcultural beings, they live in a United States that is figured as the borderlands, a consumer society inhabited by nomads and the dispossessed. She writes from the position of a Latina, and there is a Latina sensibility or affect in all of her oeuvre. Her plays, however, defy and question the simple categorization or easy boxing of Latinas and Latinos both in content and in form. She stages the drama of her characters in such a way that they become an expressionistic allegory of the uncertainty of post-modern times: displaced human beings reconfigure the maps of home in a nonlinear fashion so that we can inhabit our imagined and imaginary communities of Mexico-Hollywood-Buenos Aires-Granada-Havana-New York.” (Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. Volume 1. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 (184-6)

In 2003, while Svich was a TCG/Pew National Theatre Resident Artist at INTAR in New York City, she founded NoPassport, an unincorporated, artist-driven, grass-roots theatre alliance & press devoted to cross-cultural, Pan-American performance, theory, action, advocacy, and publication. NoPassport exists as a virtual and live forum for the exchange of work and dreams, a network between theatres and the academy, and a mobile band of playwrights, directors, actors, producers and musicians and provides mentoring for young artists. Early stages of NoPassport developed in New York City and Brooklyn at Little Theatre at Tonic, Low Bar and BRIC, and at the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis, the latter where Svich had done a residency post-MFA. She has also published over twenty titles with NoPassport Press by authors as diverse as Todd London, John Jesurun, David Greenspan, Carson Kreitzer, Rinde Eckert, Lenora Champagne and Octavio Solis. NoPassport has also responded with creative action to incidents such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the US Gulf region, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, and Climate Change. For example, with the work After Orlando: an international theatre action, a collective of over seventy playwrights from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom (England and Wales), Australia, and Uganda. Women, men, genderqueer playwrights, LGTBQ, Latinx, Latin@, playwrights of many colors and ethnicities was presented at more than thirty theatres and colleges, universities, and high schools across the U.S. and UK in the fall of 2016. In addition to her work with NoPassport Press, she is the Associate Editor, and Editor of BackPages, Contemporary Theatre Review theatre and performance journal in the UK, and since 2004, a Contributing Editor to TheatreForum, an international theatre and performance journal, UC-San Diego and the Drama Editor of Asymptote literary translation journal.

Svich has maintained a career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca, published in Federico García Lorca: impossible theater: five plays and thirteen poems; in new translations by Caridad Svich (Smith & Kraus, 2000), Lorca Major Plays Volume I, and Lorca: Major Plays Volume II (NoPassport Press), as well as works by Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Julio Cortazar, Victor Rascon Banda, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary works from Mexico, Cuba and Spain. She is the editor of a number of publications including Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes, Smith & Kraus, NH (1999), Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/o Theatre and Performance (2000), Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Manchester University Press, UK/Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2002), Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries, conversations on media, culture, language and performance, Manchester University Press, UK/Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2004), Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks, Back Stage Books (an imprint of Watson-Guptill), NY (2005) Emerging Territories: Latino/a Theatre and Performance, special issue eds. Caridad Svich and Maria Delgado, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Vol. 16, No. 3, CUNY Grad Center, NY (Fall 2004), Popular Forms for a Radical Theatre, special issue, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol.16, No. 8, Routledge, UK (2006), Out of Silence: Censorship in Theatre & Performance, Eyecorner Press, Denmark and USA (2012), The Breath of Theatre 2003-2013, conversations with artists and critical reflections, NoPassport Press, CA (2013), Innovation in Five: Strategies for Theatre & Performance (2015).

In 2019, Svich was shortlisted for the American Shakespeare Center's Shakespeare's New Contemporaries Prize. She won both the Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Tanne Foundation Award in 2018. Other theatre awards and fellowships include the National Latino Playwriting Award (2013), OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012), Edgerton Foundation New Play Award (2012), American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize (2011), and HOLA Award for Playwriting (2009). Earlier awards include the Whitfield Cook Prize for New Writing at New Dramatists (2007), National Latino Playwriting Award (2003), TCG/PEW National Theatre Artist Residency at INTAR (2002-2003), Radcliffe Institute fellowship at Harvard University (2002-2003), Jonathan R. Reynolds Playwright in Residence at Denison University (2002), Thurber House Fellow at Ohio State University (2001), NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre (1996-1997), and Rosenthal New Play Prize at Cincinnati Playhouse (1994).