Caridad Svich

Caridad Svich is a playwright and theater-maker. Her work in theater is known for its poetic lyricism, rich imagery, interdisciplinary focus and commitment to human and environmental rights. Among her awards is a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement. As founder of NoPassport Theater Alliance and Press, Svich’s work has intersected with communities of multiple diversities such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the US Gulf region, veterans and their families and survivors of trauma. Her focus also includes those committed to artistic expression of the uncertainties and representations of the “fragile shores” in our lives. She is co-organizer and curator of After Orlando theater action in response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. Her key works among her own plays include 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart, The Booth Variations, Alchemy of Desired/Dead- Man’s Blues, Any Place But Here, The Way of Water and JARMAN (all this maddening beauty). She is at work on a seven-play cycle entitled American Psalm. She sustains a parallel career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca, Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Julio Cortazar, Victor Rascon Banda, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary works from Mexico, Cuba and Spain. She has also adapted for the stage novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Alvarez, Jose Leon Sanchez and Isabel Allende, for whose The House of the Spirits Svich was awarded the 2011 American Theater Critics Association Primus Prize. She has radically reconfigured works from Wedekind, Euripedes, Sophocles and Shakespeare. Her works have been seen at venues across the United State and abroad, including Arena Stage’s Kogod Cradle Series, Denver Center Theatre, 59E59, The Women’s Project in the U.S. and Ilkhom Theater (Ubekistan), Teatro Expressivo (Costa Rica), Welsh Fargo Stage (Wales), Homotopia Festival (UK) and Edinburgh Fringe Festival(UK). Svich is an alumna playwright of New Dramatists. She trained for four consecutive years with Maria Irene Fornes in INTAR’s legendary HRPLLab. She teaches creative writing and playwriting at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Primary Stages Einhorn School of Performing Arts. In 2018, her play Red Bike received a rolling world premiere with the National New Play Network (USA). An initial workshop phase began with interdisciplinary piece Mi Cuba at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. There was a workshop of opera libretto Bernarda Alba at Cleveland Opera Theatre (will premiere in 2020); readings of three of the plays in the seven-play cycle American Psalm were presented at Simpatico Theatre in Philadelphia, and a US book launch of co-authored book Fifty Playwrights On Their Craft at Drama Book Shop in NYC.

www.caridadsvich.com
www.nopassport.org

This bio/description was originally published in 2018 and updated in 2019. For more current information, please refer to the award recipient's website (if provided).