Obie Award-winning playwright Caridad Svich will lead a discussion at the Tang Teaching Museum organized in conjunction with the forthcoming multilingual premiere of her play The Orphan Sea at Skidmore College’s Black Box Theater. Svich’s talk, “From Small Things… or the Politics of Hope,” centers around Ruins, a sculpture in the Tang Collection by artist Johannes VanDerBeek. Following her talk, actors will perform excerpts of the play in front of the sculpture.

A playwright-lyricist-translator-editor of Cuban-Spanish-Argentine-Croatian descent, Svich has long been interested in the crossing of cultures. As she notes, “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 writings.” Svich received the 2012 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, 2011 ATCA Primus Prize, and the National Latino Playwriting Award twice in her career, among many additional accolades.

The Orphan Sea by Caridad Svich is directed by Eunice S. Ferreira and translated into multiple languages by the creative team. Performances are November 30-December 6 at Skidmore College. For more information visit the Skidmore Theater Department website.

This event is organized in collaboration with Eunice S. Ferreira, Assistant Professor of Theater at Skidmore College, and is supported by Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at the Tang Teaching Museum, a project of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

About Caridad Svich

Caridad Svich received a 2012 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theater, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and NNPN rolling world premiere for Guapa, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the Isabel Allende novel. She has won the National Latino Playwriting Award (sponsored by Arizona Theatre Company) twice, including in the year 2013 for her play Spark. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times, including in 2012 for her play Magnificent Waste. Her works in English and Spanish have been seen at venues across the U.S. and abroad, among them San Diego Repertory Theatre, Gala Hispanic Theatre, Denver Center Theatre, Mixed Blood Theatre, 59E59, The Women’s Project, RepertorioEspañol, Salvage Vanguard, Teatro Mori (Chile), Artheater-Cologne (Germany), Ilkhom Theater (Uzbekistan), and Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK. Recent premieres include The Hour of All Things at Ensemble Studio Theatre/NY under William Carden’s direction; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (based on the Mario Vargas Llosa novel) at Repertorio Español in New York City, In the Time of the Butterflies (based on the Julia Alvarez novel) at San Diego Rep; JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) at Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C.; and Upon the Fragile Shore at Summerworks Festival in Toronto, Canada.

Among her key works are 12 Ophelias, Any Place But Here, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, and Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable). Seven of her plays are published in Instructions for Breathing and Other Plays (Seagull Books and University of Chicago Press, 2014). Five of her plays radically re-imagining ancient Greek tragedies are published in Blasted Heavens (Eyecorner Press, University of Denmark, 2012). Her works are also published by TCG, Broadway Play Publishing, Manchester University Press, Playscripts, Arte Publico Press, Smith & Kraus, Alexander Street Press, StageReads and more. Among her awards and recognitions are: Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship TCG/Pew Charitable Trusts National Theater Artist Residency at INTAR, NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency at the Mark Taper Theatre Forum Latino Theatre Initiative.

She has edited several books on theater including Innovation in Five Acts (TCG, 2015), Out of Silence: Censorship in Theatre & Performance (Eyecorner Press, 2014), and Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries (Manchester University Press, 2004). She sustains a parallel career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca as well as works by Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Julio Cortazar, Victor Rascon Banda, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary works from Mexico, Cuba and Spain.

She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists, Drama Editor of Asymptote literary journal, associate editor of Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge,UK), contributing editor of TheatreForum, and founder of NoPassport theatre alliance and press (www.nopassport.org), which recently published Todd London’s collection of essays The Importance of Staying Earnest. She is a Lifetime Member of EST, and is on the advisory board for the US-Mexico Exchange at the Lark Play Development Center in New York City. She holds an MFA n Playwriting from UCSD. Website: http://www.caridadsvich.com.