Cartography Lessons with Caridad Svich
The ancient and the contemporary collide in the dreamscapes of her plays
by Justin Maxwell
On stage at Manhattan's Repertorio Español, a beautiful woman with green hair holds a plush toy, telekinetically wafted from a nearby tree, while her little sister and a huge black dog-puppet cavort around her. Screens covered in handwritten text make the stage seem vast, and a girl from two generations away watches it all from her torture chamber.
At Passage Theatre Company in Trenton, N.J., a woman is alone on a stage. A girl's voice offers a monologue in the second person, speaking as much to the woman as she is to herself, as she is to us. Then darkness. The woman and her husband, a deeply bourgeois couple, sneak off to a party, making a narcissistic (if seemingly harmless) decision about child care. Everyone in the audience knows something bad is about to happen, and no one can breathe for wondering: What?
At Crowded Fire Theater Company in San Francisco, two terrified boys huddle on a beach. Are they revenants? Castaways? Victims of an unspeakable calamity? They don't know, and neither do we. But soon they argue, and a woman in an expensive dress comes...for just one of them.
These are the world-premiere plays of Caridad Svich that have opened this past season: La Casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits, in translation), Instructions for Breathing and Wreckage. In all three works, Svich reveals herself as a cartographer of cultural dreamscapes. Each play maps out profoundly different, but profoundly human, terrain. These plays, one might say, are like people we know—different on the surface, but driven by similarly human hearts. It is a condition they share with Svich's most widely produced work, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), which received its Austin, Tex., debut early this year in a top-flight production at Salvage Vanguard Theater.
Each of these plays is an adaptation, in the best sense of the word. Svich isn't retelling old stories, but finding an ancient spark and letting it ignite her very contemporary aesthetics. These are adaptations whose sources live in the deeply Jungian recesses of cultural memory, like shared dreams. The House of the Spirits comes from Isabel Allende's novel of the same name, a seminal work of magic realism. Wreckage gives new life to Medea's children. And the child that disappears in Euripides' Ion disappears again in Instructions for Breathing.
Such source material surreptitiously sprawls through Western culture. Consequently, each of these plays is an act of postmodern mythopoesis, engaging the complexities of the 21st-century stage. The House of the Spirits, for example, depicts a world of plasticized sociopolitical identity—one of the most interesting manifestations of which is the use of many different Spanish accents. By simply having each actor keep the tone and inflection of his or her own Spanish dialect, the audience is shifted out of the artificial, homogeneous world usually portrayed on a stage and into an implied cross-cultural pastiche. This allows the play (even for an anglophone audience) to seem alien and familiar simultaneously.
With a wink and a nod of staging, both Wreckage and Instructions for Breathing could happen in any developed nation, and most developing ones as well. In Wreckage, for example, a convenience-store security camera offers a leitmotif of visual information to help the audience interpret and reinterpret the events of the plot, which could be unfolding in any seaside community from Coney Island to Acapulco.
Svich's diverse plays are both freshly contemporary and popularly accessible, often blurring boundaries and assembling fragments aesthetically appropriate for a pressurized culture. These are plays of quantum suspense, where anything can happen at any time—but once that anything happens, it feels like the only thing that could have happened after all. The death of the giant dog Barrabás, in The House of the Spirits, is one such moment. It is allusion and foreshadowing simultaneously—Svich draws out the connection between Allende's narrative and the biblical story of Barrabás (the criminal who was freed while Jesus was sent to be crucified) while having the dog die for a family's and a culture's sins. Barrabás's death becomes the harbinger of their impending suffering.
Svich's professional colleagues have strong praise for her work. San Francisco–based Erin Gilley, the director of Wreckage, says Svich's work is "filled with the tension of opposing forces—love and destruction, power and vulnerability, wealth and poverty, boys and girls." The director of Instructions for Breathing, New Yorker Daniella Topol, says she is "amazed by Caridad's ability to trust, listen, study, ask, embrace and experience. Instructions," she goes on, "is a very visceral, emotional, and quiet play. Caridad leads all of us—myself, the actors and designers, and the audience—into the middle of the ocean of loss and asks us to find a way to survive there. We do."
José Zayas, the director of The House of the Spirits and a collaborator on upcoming Svich projects, describes her as "one of the most intellectually rigorous and linguistically exciting playwrights working in America today. She sees art as provocation, and her texts are blueprints for creative teams. There is no right way of doing her plays—there is only exploration and transformation." Working on a play by Svich, he says, "You feel taken care of and you feel brave."
Svich offers up caring and bravery in more places than on the stage, via her work as a translator, essayist and activist. Most notable among these endeavors is organizing the Pan-American theatre collective NoPassport. Active since 2003, the collective holds an annual conference, for which this year's topic was "Dreaming the Americas: Legacy and R/Evolution in Performance." NoPassport also sponsors an imprint publication that brought out four anthologies this year: Matthew Maguire: Three Plays; John Jesurun: Deep Sleep, White Water; Black Maria—A Media Trilogy; Amparo Garcia-Crow: The South Texas Plays; and Antigone Project: A Play in Five Parts (featuring Antigone variations by Svich and four other female writers). The conference and publications aim, Svich says, to foster dialogue between scholars, performers and theatre artists.
When I spoke with Svich in New York City before an April performance of The House of the Spirits, she discussed her complex impulses as a writer and her work beyond playwriting.
JUSTIN MAXWELL: Your three most recent plays illustrate diverse tastes. What approaches do you take as an artist that lead you to such different aesthetic places?
CARIDAD SVICH: House of the Spirits is a kind of carnival play. It has puppets; it has music; it has some very short scenes that collapse against each other. I wanted to deal with the idea of brokenness. And ghost stories (which I love) about people who haunt the past. But I thought: "How do you haunt the future?" We're creating that visually on stage by keeping Alba [the youngest of three generations of the Trueba family] on stage throughout—she is actually haunting scenes that she would have never even heard of, had we told a completely linear story. It's complicated, and I love it.
The play's songs came out of a very sculptural process, working with textual planes, panels and rhythm. I actually wrote them in English first, and had them translated for the Spanish version. I had translated some of my own plays into Spanish, but I had never actually written a full-length work in Spanish before. Spanish has different rhythms, a lot of curlicue kinds of rhythms, as opposed to the straighter rhythms of English, which is a harsher language.
With Instructions for Breathing, I wrote for the first time about the "middle class," people in the center of power. It started with the idea of looking at class and suburbia. I started by writing about 30 pages of different voices. I didn't know who they were—I was just exploring these vague tangibles that I had: class, Ion, a lost child. When we did a first reading it still didn't have character designations. But that let me deal with the page as page, the white space, and marking it in a very different way than I had before. So this play came from that concern as a writer, perhaps a more poetic concern.
In Wreckage, which came first in the chronology of these three plays, the discrete way that media functions parallels my interest in surveillance and eavesdropping. A lot of my plays deal with surveillance—House of the Spirits, of course, deals with it because it's told from the point of view of Alba in the torture chamber. All three of these are restless plays. With Wreckage, I wanted to anchor all that restlessness to a story, and to continue my interest in adapting the Greeks—thus the idea of adapting Medea. I was really interested in how you live in that house, and how you grow up in that house. In some ways, Medea is about anger, a troubled dream world where cycles of trauma need to be repeated in order to be released. We're seeing the last vestige of the wreckage of a marriage and these boys who are wreckage in society. I've always been interested in that—in people who are neglected, who are cast off. I feel like one of my jobs as a writer is to show those we rarely get to see.
Surveillance, the middle class, linguistics, myth; you seem to have some wonderfully contradictory impulses in these works.
A few years ago, I had a war with myself about writing in a carnival-land voice versus writing in a savage, lean voice. I learned that both are part of my sensibility. I made a conscious decision to say, "I'm going to put these two things together. I don't want to be at war anymore with these two sides of my writing voice." Then I moved into work that deals with technology and electronica, both in terms of sound and staging. This reflects my interest in virtuality and liminal spaces-places that are in-between, where the mundane and poetic are juxtaposed. That's coupled with a continued interest in silence, a continued interest in ecstasy, and in moments that are magical.
Despite my better nature, despite my interest in deconstruction, I'm really a classicist. I'm interested in caressing myth and stealing it—stealing it away and re-showing it to people, but not really breaking it. So it's a war I have with myself as a writer, because I'm attracted to worlds that are disruptive, that are nonlinear, that are against established forms and traditions; and at the same time I'm deeply enamored of traditional structures, classical rise and fall. That war is in my work—that war is operative.
I'm interested in dream time; I'm interested in that space where you can go anywhere. If the writing can go anywhere, the body can go anywhere. You can become another body. Things can mutate in interesting ways. In most of my plays, dreams are alive in the space in a tangible way.
Beyond the overt use of dreams, how do music and language work together in your plays?
Someone said, "When I hear you read, you don't differentiate between the spoken and the sung." For me, they go together, like a song that weaves into a speech and back into a song. That's how my play Twelve Ophelias is built. I'm interested in lyricism. I'm interested in the voice in space, so I'm interested in anything that lifts the voice, and song does that. It also has a different emotional relationship to an audience.
Another thing about songs is that they are handed down—in The House of the Spirits, there's a sequence of lullabies that mothers are singing to their children. What do those lullabies tell us? What are they teaching their children? I'm putting together stuff that doesn't usually go together, with sharp juxtapositions—the abstract and the quotidian, pop culture next to high art. That's who we are, and I stay open to that sensibility. Even in structures where there's a less obvious sense of song, discrete musical motifs are still there.
You're involved with a variety of projects beyond playwriting. Could you talk a bit about them?
This brings up my career as a translator of Lorca. I feel that's a kind of tutelage that has happened in my work—there's a real impact from my being inside Lorca's head, which you have to be as a translator. He's taught me a lot about writing, certainly different kinds of writing that are very free and symbolic, but also very personal and risk-taking. Even now, his work feels risky.
Beyond that, issues of migration and displacement have become more and more central to my writing and my advocacy, and what I write about critically. This interest in migration and displacement parallels what started my career, the advocate and the activist in me—which brought about the anthology I co-edited [with Maria Teresa Marrero], Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance. I feel a certain responsibility—we can't just be writers, we have to be leaders. I have colleagues who feel they don't have that responsibility, but I really feel that it isn't enough to just write plays.
Could you talk about the process of generating those plays?
[The poet] Anne Carson is such a goddess to me. She wakes me up. You open up her Autobiography of Red and all that courage comes forward. All is possible. Sometimes it feels like nothing's possible, and it's debilitating, especially if you're doing experimental work. When good writers do work that other people look at and say, "I don't know how to read it," I always reply by asking: "Could you read it aloud? I bet you'd know exactly how it works if you read it aloud." I write for the body in space, and I write for the voice in space—so it's not meant to be literary; you're not supposed to get it in readings. You're supposed to get it in performance. That's what plays are supposed to be. They're meant to be performed. That's one of the perils of reading series—they're creating plays for readings. If I wanted it to read well, I'd write a poem or a novel—something that exists in an intimate relationship with the reader.
At the end of the day I want to do realistic plays, but I'm a metaphysical writer, and that's really where I live. I can't help myself. I'm always going to be on that side of the divide. I'm interested in literal social realism. Sometimes I just think, "Damn it! I just want to be Zola and do social critique for the masses," but I can't do that. I'm too interested in the interior lives of people. One of my early influences was Virginia Woolf. I read Woolf's The Waves, and it was like, "Okay, I'm with you." And once you're marked in that way as a writer, when you realize where your kinships are, then that's the world you live in. That's what turns me on as a reader and as an artist. I can admire all sorts of things, but that's my juice. I'm stuck there. I love it too much.
Minneapolis-based Justin Maxwell is a 2008-09 American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.