“Caridad, weaves an alchemical combination of intellect, heart, and sensuality powerful enough to crack open the suffocating shell that builds up from the daily repetitions of life.”
~Producing Artistic Director Kevin Lawler, Opening Address of The Writer’s Voice, PlayFest 2011, The Great Plains Theatre Conference
“Caridad Svich is an artist whose athletic intelligence and imagination are balanced, incredibly, with the intensity of her heart, and, as if that wasn’t enough, those qualities are woven through with a fabric of sensuality that encapsulates both the light and dark aspects of life. The entire combination is utterly beautiful, unique, and life giving.”
~Producing Artistic Director Kevin Lawler, Opening Address for Alchemy of Desire/Dead-man’s Blues, PlayFest 2011, The Great Plains Theatre Conference
“The themes, styles and concerns that shape Svich’s dramaturgy are: a critique of the American Dream and a constant search for home through the prism of diaspora and migration; the mixing of rituals and traditional cultural elements from the Americas with global pop culture; obtuse treatment of love and desire; and a poetic and nonrealistic use of language and musical elements.Svich’s characters survive by becoming “professional” nomads. Like their creator, they find themselves at the intersection of identities. As hybrids or transcultural beings, they live in a United States that is figured as the borderlands, a consumer society inhabited by nomads and the dispossessed.
She writes from the position of a Latina, and there is a Latina sensibility or affect in all of her oeuvre. Her plays, however, defy and question the simple categorization or easy boxing of Latinas and Latinos both in content and in form.
She stages the drama of her characters in such a way that they become an expressionistic allegory of the uncertainty of post-modern times: displaced human beings reconfigure the maps of home in a nonlinear fashion so that we can inhabit our imagined and imaginary communities of Mexico-Hollywood-Buenos Aires-Granada-Havana-New York.”
~Lillian Manzor on Caridad Svich in Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. Volume 1. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 (184-6)