About Me
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, but also an idea made manifest through the enactment of writing, its performance, and my living of it. Born in the US of Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents, I have felt in a strange kind of exile even while growing up as an “American.” This sense of dislocation extends to the fact that as a child and adolescent, I lived in several states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, New York, and California, not to mention many cross-country road trips in between. The nomadic strain was thus instilled in me and has become an inevitable part of my writing vision. 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. 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.
~Caridad Svich in “Visions of Migration” Performance Research
Read the July/August 2009 American Theatre cover story “Cartography Lessons with Caridad Svich “
Bio
Caridad Svich is a US Latina playwright, translator, songwriter, lyricist and editor. She was awarded the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the novel by Isabel Allende. She has also been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama three times, including in the year 2010 for her play Instructions for Breathing. Other awards include the National Latino Playwriting Award, Whitfield Cook Award for New Writing, HOLA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting, Lee Reynolds Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women, and the Rosenthal New Play Prize. Her theatre pieces and songs, written in English and Spanish, have been presented across the US and abroad at diverse venues including Denver Center Theatre, Mixed Blood Theatre, Main Street Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, The Women’s Project, Repertorio Espanol, INTAR, 59East59, Victory Gardens, McCarren Park Pool, 7 Stages, Salvage Vanguard Theatre/ TX, Teatro Mori Parque Arauco (Santiago, Chile), ARTheater (Cologne), Teatro Mexico (Quito, Ecuador), and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK.
2011 premieres: her play In the Time of the Butterflies (based on the novel by Julia Alvarez), in her Spanish-language version, at Repertorio Espanol in New York City under Jose Zayas’ direction, her dark comedy Magnificent Waste at Factory 449 in Washington D.C under John Moletress’ direction, and her light romantic comedy, freely adapted and translated from a play by Spanish Golden Age playwright Maria Zayas de Sotomayor, A Little Betrayal Among Friends at Airmid Theatre’s outdoor Summer Theatre Festival in Long Island under Tricia McDermott’s direction.
Among her key works: 12 Ophelias (a play with broken songs), Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, Any Place But Here, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), Fugitive Pieces, and the multimedia collaboration The Booth Variations. She has been profiled in American Theatre magazine. Her work as playwright and translator has been developed by many arts organizations including the Royal Court, Traverse Theatre, Center Stage, A Contemporary Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Mark Taper Forum Theatre, and Seattle Rep. A collection of seven of her plays is forthcoming in 2012 from UK publisher Seagull Books.
She has translated nearly all of Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays and also fourteen of his poems, and theatrical works by Julio Cortazar, Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary plays from Mexico, Cuba and Catalonia, and Serbia. She is on the advisory board of the US-Mexico Word Exchange at the Lark Play Development Center. Her plays and translations are published by TCG, Routledge, Smith & Kraus, Playscripts, Arte Publico Press and more. She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists, founder of NoPassport theatre alliance & press, associate editor of Routledge/UK’s Contemporary Theatre Review, contributing editor of TheatreForum, and Drama Editor for Asymptote international translation magazine. She has edited several books on theatre and performance including Trans-Global Readings and Theatre in Crisis? (both for Manchester University Press) and Divine Fire (BackStage Books).
She’s been a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University, NEA/TCG Playwright in Residence at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre, TCG/PEW Playwright in Residence at INTAR. She is a member of PEN American Center, The Dramatists Guild and the Playwrights Center, She is associate artist of LoNyLa, an affiliated artist with the Lark Play Development Center and New Georges, and a contributing artist of Woodshed Collective. She is an entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino History. She trained for four years with playwright Maria Irene Fornes, and also holds an MFA in Theatre-Playwriting from UCSD, and a BFA from UNC-Charlotte. Website: www.caridadsvich.com
