Caridad Svich (Primus Prize) and Darren Canady (Osborn Award) to attend ATCA/Chicago

Caridad Svich (Primus Prize) and Darren Canady (Osborn Award) to attend ATCA/Chicago

 Svich and Canady, winners of the 2011 Primus  and 2012 Osborn, respectively, have already received their checks. But they will join us Friday, June 15, for us to applaud their achievements — and they will be with us for much of the Chicago conference, for us to enjoy their company.

Svich has been especially busy lately, so …

News about Caridad Svich, winner of he 2011 Primus Prize for her The House of Spirits:

1. Caridad has just published a compelling essay in the online TCG Circle about activism, artistry and environmental plays, connected especially to her new play, The Way of Water. Read it here and “like” it, if you do.

2. There is a reading of The Way of Water, directed by Jose Zayas, on May 29, 7 pm, at the Ensemble Studio Theatre (William Carden, Artistic Director), 549 West 52nd Street, 2nd Floor (between 10th & 11th), NYC.

THE PLAY puts the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico next to the lives of those directly affected by it. It’s a story about four people making do as best they can, trying to stay afloat in the land of many compromised dreams, as the devastation of a health and environmental crisis in the US Gulf is played out on a human scale. It’s a play about poverty in America, rumors and truth, what is said and what gets written, and the quest for an honorable life.

The Way of Water was developed at the 2011 Winter Writers Retreat and 2012 Studio Retreat at the Lark Play Development Center in New York City. This reading is presented as part of an international reading scheme in collaboration with NoPassport theatre alliance. Dramaturgy: Heather Helinsky and R. Alex Davis. Click for official web page.

3. The National New Play Network (NNPN), an alliance of non-profit theaters that champions the development, production, and continued life of new plays, announces its 30th Rolling World Premiere: Caridad Svich’s Guapa will receive three productions in the 2012/13 season. Guapa will begin its Rolling World Premiere at Borderlands Theater (Tucson, AZ, October 5 – 21), followed by Miracle Theatre Group (Portland, OR, March 22 – April 13) and Phoenix Theatre (Indianapolis, IN, spring dates TBA).

THE PLAY: In a small Texas town long fractured by class struggle and racism, a single mother named Roly works to give her makeshift family a shot at their dreams. Together they adopt a young woman named Guapa (“beautiful”), who wants nothing more than to play women’s soccer. With her hallmark lyricism and political commitment, Svich has written a border-fantasy filled with magical sports dreams, graffiti, birds in flight, indigenous history, trauma, recovery, and the possibility of a better life.

CARIDAD SVICH is a US Latina playwright, translator, lyricist and editor whose works have been presented across the US and abroad at diverse venues, including the Denver Center, Mixed Blood Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Repertorio Espanol, 59East59, McCarren Park Pool, 7 Stages, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, Teatro Mori (Santiago, Chile), ARTheater (Cologne), and Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK. She received the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the novel by Isabel Allende, and has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama three times, including in 2010 for Instructions for Breathing. Her key works include 12 Ophelias, Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man’s Blues, Iphigenia…A Rave Fable, Love in the Time of Cholera (based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel), The Way of Water, and the multimedia collaboration The Booth Variations. An alumna of New Dramatists, she holds an MFA in Theatre-Playwriting from UCSD, and has taught creative writing and playwriting at Bard College, Barnard College, Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Yale School of Drama.