FUEL

A play for five actors

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.

Script History

FUEL was developed at the Lark and Sheen Center, both in New York City, under the direction of Erin Ortman. Actors involved in the play’s development have included Jo Lampert (as Baby), Sofia Jean Gomez (as Girl), Alex Esola (as Jay), Luis Vega (as Parker), Charlie Pollack (as Da) and Keith Randolph Smith (as Da). The play will receive a reading supported by the Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco as part of its 2018 Rough Readings Series under the direction of Evren Odcikin.

FUEL is the second in the RED BIKE cycle of plays.

Articles about FUEL

Broadway World: https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Jo-Lampert-Alex-Esola-and-More-to-Star-in-Reading-Caridad-Svichs-FUEL-20170921

Lark blog: https://www.larktheatre.org/blog/fuel-hurt-n-holler-trouble-red-bike/

Essay about FUEL and the entire play cycle of which it is a part:
https://www.larktheatre.org/blog/fuel-hurt-n-holler-trouble-red-bike/

Script Perusal

https://newplayexchange.org/plays/126701/fuel

 “I love the simple poetic nature of Svich’s dialogue. These characters don’t always say much but their connections with each other and their current situations are so clear. Also that last moment will drive audience to sobs. Though much more expressionistic than other plays about blue collar communities, this piece deserves to be alongside Dominique Morriseau’s Skeleton Crewand Lynn Nottage’s Sweatas plays that truly speak to the heart of this nation today. ”  — Shaun Leisher on the New Play Exchange

“I like Svich, a lot, I’ve written such, and this play’s brilliant. Partly why I admire ‘Fuel’ is it’s the latest of a recent, simpler, more ingenious, purer quality of writing Svich’s been exhibiting in her last two, three scripts. She’s always poetic; what excites me, my imagination, interpretation, is her profound allegory of a plausible USA. She’s been pertinent; this feels prescient. I’m prudent about pulling off a puppet on stage, come the day, I hope it’s worthy of this. Svich is Queen of Duo Against the World, but this pair is nearly trapped by one tragic “complicity.” Home. ”  — Ricardo Soltero-Brown on the New Play Exchange

“FUEL is a poetic meditation on our current moment when the shiny ideal of the American dream is no longer viable for most. It asks what happens to our young people when they cannot see a future for themselves, and the kind of brutal violence they can enact — on themselves and others — to feel alive. FUEL reminds me of the best of Sam Shepard, but if it were written by a Latinx female playwright in 2018 who has expanded the lens to include us all in that specifically American landscape.” — Evren Odcikin, Director