Caridad Svich

Featuring conversations with theatre makers in the US and UK during the first 8 months of the Covid-19 lockdown, this collection reveals the innovations in digital theatre as artists, companies and theatres had to adjust to the restrictions and formulate new ways of working and reaching audiences. Besides documenting in their own words the work that was generated, this book captures the artists' dreams for a new post-Covid reality in which theatre is reimagined and issues of racial and economic injustice are addressed. With conversations grouped under 5 broad areas, a host of theatre makers candidly discuss the present and the future of theatre: * R/evolution: How should theatre evolve rather than re-set? What kind of field could this be, if the arts sector is to survive in the US and UK and if white supremacist, classist, ableist, and patriarchal structures are dismantled, and acts of regeneration and reformation occur? * What does theatre look like at the local and hyper-local level and when working with young people and communities at risk? * What are the challenges of creating work in the digital realm and/or exploring socially distanced performance in new ways? * How may theatre address social inequalities and be a place for acts of political and artistic resistance? How has the pandemic galvanised their commitments to communities, arts advocacy, use of languages on the stage and page, and considerations of the living archive? * Acts of communion with audiences, readers, fellow artists, students, and within ensembles and collectives. How do we find new ways to gather and make when liveness and the shared experience are challenged?

STAND by Caridad Svich. An acoustic electric poem-play of women's rage and ancient power. On this day, another woman from the village is raped. Their name is Cassandra. A chorus of women gather 'round in support of them and in defiance of the systems in which they are told they must live. A tale of protest and the ways in which all that are made vulnerable to patriarchal power may rise and move past collective trauma. This is a play-oratorio. It is also a play-drum. This is a Santa Catalina Editions/NoPassport Press publication.

DAY FOR NIGHT (fifteen tracks for disaster) by Caridad Svich. This is a vinyl recording for the page. Fifteen poetic tracks of hope, despair, longing, and prayer. The world of this piece by playwright-poet is both IRL and in the digital realm, cos most of us on the planet are cyborgs and have been for some time. This world, in part, is marked by climate grief, environmental racism, capitalism, post-human-ness, queerness, wildness, ritual, music and activism. This text was written to be read aloud. This is a Santa Catalina Editions/NoPassport Press publication.

TROUBLE IN KIND. A play by Caridad Svich. I'm A, I'm a Nother and I'm a Nother Other live in a small town on the edge of the bayou. In the aftermath of a hate crime, they all seek to re-make their lives. It's gonna take a ritual, a visiting deity and a ghostly encounter at the cross-roads to stir up the waters of progress once again. An incantation play for troubled times inflected with the timbre of tripped-out zydeco blues. This play is the seventh in the author's seven-play AMERICAN PSALM cycle. This is a Santa Catalina Editions and NoPassport Press publication.

FUEL. a play by Caridad Svich. You live in a place that reeks of gasoline. You run on fuel. You don't know anything else except living hard and surviving, but one day that fuel is gonna run out. How are you gonna know who you are, then? This is the story of Baby and their people living in a town left for dead. This is also the ballad of Baby and Girl. FUEL was developed at the Lark and Sheen Center, both in New York City, under the direction of Erin Ortman and at the Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco as part of its Rough Readings Series under the direction of Evren Odcikin. FUEL is the second play in Svich's seven-play AMERICAN PSALM cycle that began with RED BIKE. This is a Santa Catalina Editions publication, which is am imprint of NoPassport Press.

ANY PLACE BUT HERE. A play by Caridad Svich.

AN ACORN by Caridad Svich. A play-poem-conversation about facing despair and moving forward. This new edition of AN ACORN is a collaboration between NoPassport Press and One Resilient Earth, a non-profit that empowers people to become resilient to environmental change. 95 percent of the proceeds from the sales of this publication will go to ArtistReliefProject.org and the World Health Organization COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund

'… love creates something that was not there before.' – HedwigJohn Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch opened on Valentine’s Day,1998, in New York City, and ever since, it and its genderqueer heroine have captivated audiences around the world. As the first musical to feature a genderqueer protagonist as its lead, the show has had an extraordinary life on film, Broadway and in the music field. A glam rock musical with a complex relationship to issues related to art, eroticism and matters of identity formation, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a darkly exuberant fairy tale about a child that discovers she is one of a kind, but also potentially among her own kind, if she dares travel past borders that confine and try to stabilise her being and identity. Caridad Svich examines this exhilarating work through the lenses of visual and vocal rock ’n’ roll performance, the history of the American musical, and its positioning within LGBTIQ+ theatre.

AUTOPSY OF A SNOWFLAKE. (Autopsia de un copo de nieve)by Luis Santillan. Translated by Caridad Svich. In this play, a mother and her two daughters play out a darkly comic and tragic cycle of co-dependency that leads to an increasingly isolated interior landscape for each of them that spirals beyond their control. A story about the void at the heart of upper middle-class life and the patriarchal structures that contain women. This translation/adaptation was commissioned and developed at The Lark, New York City, as part of the 2019 US/Mexico Playwright Exchange Program, where it received a rehearsed reading under the direction of Adrian Alexander Alea. This publication is a collaboration between The Lark and NoPassport Press.

RED BIKE by Caridad Svich. A play about being a chid, growing up, living in small town America and figuring out where you stand in a divided country. A fable of dreams and possibility for our times. RED BIKE is an NNPN rolling world premiere. This publication is for Santa Catalina Editions and NoPassport Press.

THIS THING OF OURS by Caridad Svich. A text for live performance. In THIS THING OF OURS, an act of violence struck our city. This has happened before. We say we will put our lives back together. Years will go by. We will grow apart, come together, have children, and some of us, will wonder how to keep going, as we turn to myths and seek lessons there. In our theaters of memory, in our songs of transcendence, perhaps we will find peace. THIS THING OF OURS was first seen at Repertory Theatre of St. Louis' Ignite Festival of New Work.

GERTIE AND ALICE BY THE SEA by Caridad Svich. In the last house in the world, two women live out their days. They could be the famous Gertie and Alice, but they are not necessarily. They still do the things we do--eating, talking, laughing with friends and lovers until what they know begins to slip away, and all that is left is desire. This play was developed at The Lark, Ensemble Studio Theatre at Primary Stages, and CEAD's 2017 Dramaturgies et Dialogues Festival in Montreal, Canada.

AN ACORN by Caridad Svich. A text for performance that traces the journey of a person that loses their voice one morning after an event that shocks the foundation of the society in which they live. A poem-play for a new world order. Originally commissioned by American Blues Theater in Chicago. First produced at Brown University/Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island.

WHEN I WAS BOTH by Caridad Svich. Jenna loses her job at university after 20-odd years in the field. This action, out of her control, sends her on a journey, where she will discover more about herself than she might have ever known. As her circle of friends tries to support and challenge her, Jenna finds a new path one that becomes an investigation into memory and being a map of the self. A play about Western society's "invisible women" living within the structures of late capitalism.

STAGES OF RESISTANCE: THEATRE AND POLITICS IN THE CAPITALOCENE edited by Caridad Svich with Olivia George. A collection of essays, interviews & reflections on the multiple meanings of political theatre, and the ways in which progressive, wholistic cultural change may be instigated through artworks. Contributors include Rachel Mars and Roberta Mock, Maddy Costa, Andy Smith, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Yvette Nolan, Leila Buck, Dipika Guha, Zakiyyah Alexander, Andy Field and more. This publication is a collaboration between The Lark and NoPassport Press.

JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) by Caridad Svich. This text for live performance by OBIE winning playwright Caridad Svich is inspired by the life and works of British filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942-1994). An homage and reflection on the legacy of queer art, this piece tells the story of a beautiful boy and queer angel in the now looking back at then. A dazzling poetic rendering, JARMAN explores the limits of the possible for both stage and film. First produced by force/collision ensemble in Washington D. C., the piece toured limited venues in the US and UK in 2014 and 2015. Published in a collection by the author from Intellect Books in the UK in 2016, this is a new single edition of the performance text from Santa Catalina Editions and NoPassport.

This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection – often tested, but never wholly severed – across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring 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 pretend that the complex and thorny questions of existence are easily settled.

ARCHIPELAGO by Caridad Svich is a memory play, a love story, and a dream of life. This play for two actors premiered at Lighthouse Poole Centre for the Arts in England and later at Son of Semele Ensemble in Los Angeles in the USA. This edition is published with Santa Catalina Editions and NoPassport.