Category: News

Lark Play Development Center presents a roundtable* reading of

SPARK

a new play by Caridad Svich

Director Liaison: Jose Zayas

Cast includes: Audrey Esparza, Keira Keeley, Flor De Liz Perez, Steven Rishard, Juan Francisco Villa 

Dramaturgs: Heather Helinsky, Zac Kline

on Sept 5, 2012 at 6:30 PM

Roundtable readings are closed to the public.

“All of us are born to burn.”

–Lexie in Spark

Spark is a play about three sisters living in the US caught in the mess of a recent war’s aftermath. It is about what happens when soldiers come home, when women of little economic means must find a way to make do and carry on, and the strength, ultimately, of family. A contemporary US story of faith, love, war, trauma, and a bit of healing.

Credits: SPARK was publically commissioned by Elaine Avila, Daniel Banks, Raymond Dooley, Amparo Garcia-Crow, Amy Gonzalez, Peter Lichtenfels, Charlotte Meehan, Christi Moore, Flor De Liz Perez, Marisel Polanco, Teresa Perez-Frangie, Otis Ramsey-Zoe, Claudio Raygoza, J.T.Rogers, Meghan Wolf and Tamilla Woodard.

I first dipped my toes into a swimming pool when I was five years old. I was at a hotel in Miami, Florida on holiday with my parents. We had a week in the sun before traveling back to Paterson, New Jersey, where we lived at the time. I was absolutely terrified of swimming, but was attracted to the water, and moreover the freedom everyone in the pool seemed to possess with such remarkable ease. There was something thrilling, sensual and dangerous about the pool, and I was eager to let go of my fear and take my first stab at this thing called “swimming.”

My dad, a former athlete and enviably powerful swimmer, called at me from inside the hotel pool. “Dip your toes in,” he said in his Argentine-inflected Spanish, “and then slowly let yourself in. We’ll learn one step at a time.” The combination of south Florida sun and the slightly inappropriate beauty of a hotel swimming pool steps away from the Atlantic Ocean was too much to resist, and so, I, stepped in.

I don’t know what I expected. Some sort of magic? Life transformation? But the water was just water. Warm from the sun with a slightly cool undertow. I tugged at my blue bathing suit and kept walking into it. My dad was waiting for me and held my hand, and slowly, slowly, I had my first swimming lesson. What I remember most was the feeling—one that continues to this day when I swim, especially in pool water—of absolute yet controlled freedom, and at the same time, eerie otherworldliness. If swimming in the ocean is meeting Nature, swimming in a pool is about meeting yourself, and also an extension of yourself.

Read the whole essay here

Caridad Svich’s play THE WAY OF WATER with a foreword by Henry Godinez from the Goodman Theater, is the first issue of StageReads founded by Meredith Lynsey Schade and Jody Christopherson. Now available for download. Please visit the newly launched website for details!http://stagereads.com/“

Caridad Svich’s new play GUAPA is recipient of an Edgerton Foundation New Play Award grant for its October 2012 production at Borderlands Theatre in Arizona.