Caridad Svich
Caridad Svich is a playwright/text-builder, theatre-maker, translator, lyricist, editor, and educator. She received a 2018 Tanne Foundation Award, the 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, a 2018 NNPN rolling world premiere for RED BIKE, 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and NNPN 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, and the 2018 Ellen Stewart Career Achievement in Professional and Academic Theatre Award from Association of Theatre in Higher Education.
She has won the National Latino Playwriting Award (sponsored by Arizona Theatre Company) twice and was short-listed for the PEN-West Award in Drama four times. Her works in English and Spanish have been seen at venues across the US and abroad, among them Arena Stage’s Kogod Cradle Series, Denver Center Theatre, 59E59, The Women’s Project, Woodshed Collective @ McCarren Park Pool, Repertorio Espanol, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, Lighthouse Poole UK, Teatro Mori (Chile), Artheater-Cologne (Germany), Ilkhom Theater (Uzbekistan), Teatro Espressivo (Costa Rica), Welsh Fargo Stage (Wales), Homotopia Festival UK, SummerWorks festival in Toronto, and Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK.
Key works in her repertoire include 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart, The Booth Variations, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, Any Place But Here, Fugitive Pieces, The Way of Water and JARMAN (all this maddening beauty). 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.
As founder of theatre alliance & press NoPassport (www.nopassport.org) Svich has intersected with communities of multiple diversities with works responding to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the US Gulf region, veterans and their families, survivors of trauma and those committed to artistic expression of precarity, advocacy for US Latin@ writing voices, and engagement with representations of the “fragile shores” in our lives. She is co-organizer and curator of After Orlando theatre action in response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting and Climate Change Theatre Action with The Arctic Cycle and Theatre Without Borders. She has also published over twenty titles with NoPassport Press by authors as diverse as Todd London, Kia Corthron, John Jesurun, David Greenspan, Carson Kreitzer, Rinde Eckert, Lenora Champagne, and Octavio Solis.
Her works are published by TCG, Smith & Kraus, Playscripts, Broadway Play Publishing, and more. Four collections of her works for live performance are published as follows: The Hour of All Things and Other Plays (Intellect UK, 2017), JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and other plays (Intellect UK, 2016); Instructions for Breathing and other plays (Seagull Books UK, 2014); Blasted Heavens (Eyecorner Press, Denmark, 2012). She has edited several books on theatre including Fifty Playwrights on Their Craft (Methuen Drama, 2017), Audience Revolution: Dispatches from the Field (TCG, 2016), Innovation in Five Acts (TCG, 2015), Out of Silence: Censorship in Theatre & Performance and Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries and Theatre in Crisis? (the latter two for Manchester University Press, UK). She serves as associate editor at Taylor & Francis’ Contemporary Theatre Review, where she also edits their Backpages section.
Svich sustains a parallel career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca 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 alumna playwright of New Dramatists. She holds an MFA in Theatre-Playwriting from UCSD, and she also trained for four consecutive years with Maria Irene Fornes in INTAR’s legendary HPRL Lab. She teaches creative writing and playwriting at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Primary Stages’ Einhorn School of Performing Arts. She has also taught scriptwriting at The Dramatists Guild, Bard, Barnard, Bennington, Denison, Ohio State, ScriptWorks, UCSD, and Yale School of Drama. www.caridadsvich.com