The Hour of All Things and Other Plays , livre ebook

Intellect Books - Caridad Svich

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168 pages

English

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This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection – often tested, but never wholly severed – across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline, Blair Baker, Neil Scharnick, Carla Melo and Sherrine Azab, this wide-ranging, daring collection of plays refuses to pretend that the complex and thorny questions of existence are easily settled.

A Sense of Prayer in a Landscape of Catastrophe: The Plays of Caridad Svich

Ian Rowlands

Who Is It For? Practice, Spectatorship and the Body

Caridad Svich

Preacher in the Light; The Hour of All Things

Blair Baker and Zac Kline

The Hour of All Things

Caridad Svich

An Invitation to Dream: The Breath of Stars

Neil Kristian Scharnick

We Are All Still Here: Re-Existing Upon the Fragile Shore

Carla Melo

Upon the Fragile Shore

Caridad Svich

An Aria for Detroit: agua de luna (psalms for the rouge)

Sherrine Azab

agua de luna (psalms for the rogue)

Caridad Svich

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Performing Arts

Theatre

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	03 janvier 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783208500
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,4400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Playtext
Series editor: Patrick Duggan
Series ISSN: 1754-0933
Electronic ISSN: 1754-0941
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production manager: Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
ISBN: 978-1-78320-848-7
ePDF: 978-1-78320-849-4
ePUB: 978-1-78320-850-0
Cover Image: Performance of The Hour of All Things , photograph by Joshua Sterling Bragg, 2015.
All rights reserved.
The Hour of All Things copyright 2013, 2015 by Caridad Svich
The Breath of Stars copyright 2014, 2015 by Caridad Svich
Upon the Fragile Shore copyright 2014, 2015 by Caridad Svich
agua de luna (psalms for the rouge) copyright 2016 by Caridad Svich
All rights reserved.
p. 31, ‘ The Hour of All Things ’, Photograph/screenshot by Joshua Bragg.
p. 66, ‘Nosense’, (left to right): Christian Aldridge, Maura Atwood and Jordan Patrick Horne. Photograph by Martin McClendon.
p. 126, ‘Upon the Fragole Shore’s last scene; rehearsal shot’. Photograph by Shane Miersch.
p. 182, ‘ agua de luna ’. Photograph by Megan Buckley-Ball.
In regard to professional and amateur performance, readings and other enquiries for the three plays in this volume, please contact the author’s representative Elaine Devlin at Elaine Devlin Literary, 411 Lafayette Street, 6 th Flr, NY, NY 10003 USA. Email: edevlinlit@aol.com or New Dramatists alumni desk, 424 West 44 th Street, NY, NY 10036 USA.
Email: newdramatists@newdramatists.org
This is a peer-reviewed publication. Printed and bound by TJ International, UK.
Contents
A Sense of Prayer in a Landscape of Catastrophe: The Plays of Caridad Svich
Ian Rowlands
Who Is It For? Practice, Spectatorship and the Body
Caridad Svich
Preacher in the Light: The Hour of All Things
Blair Baker and Zac Kline
The Hour of All Things
Caridad Svich
An Invitation to Dream: The Breath of Stars
Neil Kristian Scharnick
The Breath of Stars
Caridad Svich
We Are All Still Here: Re-Existing Upon the Fragile Shore
Carla Melo
Upon the Fragile Shore
Caridad Svich
An Aria for Detroit: agua de luna (psalms for the rouge)
Sherrine Azab
agua de luna (psalms for the rouge)
Caridad Svich
Notes on Contributors
A Sense of Prayer in a Landscape of Catastrophe: The Plays of Caridad Svich
Ian Rowlands
Were we all to ask ourselves each and every day how our actions and deeds and words effect the shore of life (the earth’s as well as the one of our fellow human beings), might we be able to offer ways to counter damages done?
(Svich 2015: 2)
I n December 2011, Caridad Svich was one of the six playwrights that attended a Winter Writers’ Retreat at The Lark Theatre, NY. In the course of that retreat, Svich was to write the first draft of The Way of Water (2016) – a play set in southern Louisiana, a territory slowly dissolving into the sea. The play chronicles the effect the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 was having upon the lives of two couples barely staying afloat on the Gulf coast line. As one of the six, that retreat was my first encounter with Svich’s work process, agenda and sense of aesthetic. Over a nine-day period, I witnessed the seeds of her idea flower into an eco-drama of the finest order.
Having stated the above, I am aware that I have possibly diminished the play in the eyes of some by pigeonholing it as an eco-drama. For, though an eco-conscious society, somehow we consider eco-drama to be a single-issue affair – almost in the realm of historic agit prop. In a HowlRound post, Svich wrote,
I have been surprised that so very little of our many, plentiful, vibrant stages as a whole have been concerned with environmental issues that run hand in hand with issues of economic disadvantage, indigenous cultures being further marginalized and/or discarded, and ways of life and living that are being erased by either new technologies, callous and careless environmental practices, and the erosion of basic civilities in favor of corporatized ‘dealings’ with the facts and fragilities of human and natural life.
(Svich 2012) 1
As Svich states, ecologies are not solely environmental, they are spheres of influence; individuals, families, villages, languages, audiences, conglomerates, countries, deserts; micro-ecologies that coexist in the macro. An eco-drama is, therefore, not a single-issue affair. Neither is an eco-dramatist a single-issue dramatist. Far from it. Eco-dramatists deal with interaction and confrontation – the essence of all drama. As Svich notes,
Thinking ecologically about theatre and theatremaking has been there from the start for me, and even in plays where the subject matter is not ostensibly about the environment, it does inform how I approach the conception of work, its structure, and how it lives ultimately with an audience.
(2015)
It is interesting to note that Svich’s first play, Waterfall, was set in a house in New Jersey situated next to a toxic waste landfill. An ecologist from the outset, Svich has always crafted her words to ‘counter damages done’ (2015) .
The Way of Water captivated her fellow playwrights in that workshop, as it has captivated audiences ever since. It brought the languid heat of Louisiana into a rehearsal room on 42nd Street. The text has a viscous ugly beauty; the quality of oily waves slapping a beach. It is a stunning portrayal of the fragility of lives lived in a fluid place. Svich has written that plays such as The Way of Water ‘are crafted as cartographical plays that trace connections among and between land and water – usually positioned, at least from a dramaturgical perspective, in the space between, or the one we call “liminal”’ (2015).
The ‘liminal’, as defined by Svich, is an active space – a place in flux. It is a space one could equate with the dissensual , as defined by Rancière. However, whereas the liminal is a more fluid space, a ritual space of transition, the dissensual is a contested space suspended in opposition, an ‘in-spite’ of space. Regardless of semantics, both spaces are spaces of emancipation in their own way, of antagonisms, revolutions and possibilities. As Rancière writes of the dissensual space, it is ‘a place of refuge where the relations between sense and sense continue to be questioned and re-worked’ (2010). In such a space, potentials lie. Call it liminal, call it dissensual, it is a space within which to dream.
However, such spaces can only exist within a global universality – a world of multiple ecologies. Within the globalized world – a consensual world (Rancière 2010: 142–59) – such spaces are squeezed to extinction. According to Baudrillard,
[…] the universal comes to grief in globalization. The globalization of trade puts an end to the universality of values. It is the triumph of the single-track thinking over universal thought […] [T]riumphant globalization has swept away all differences and all values, bringing into being an entirely in-different culture (or lack of it).
(2003: 89–104)
Without refuge, writers cannot dream, people cannot dream and myths become proscribed.
The four texts in this volume (considered in the order written) are representative of aspects of Svich’s complex theatrical and ecological vision. They range stylistically from the edgy every day to the epic poetic, from the quotidian to the myth. Three of the four also mark the significant shift Svich has recently made away from the representational in her work. Whilst always doubting the worth of the mimetic, her recent efforts are a more focused experiment, one that attempts to define and defend a liminal space and there create strategies for theatre within the globalized technostructure.
*
The Hour of All Things is a play in eight portraits – eight stunning snapshots of a despairing and fearful woman lost in a world beyond her understanding. It is a world post-event, ‘after that awful tragedy’ (2014: 911) when all certainties tumbled from the sky. She wishes for change, or rather a re-wind; as if the event could be run backwards in the camera and sanity re-instated. However, she knows in her heart that sanity was, at best, an illusion, the projection of the idealistic ‘punk fury’ of her youth. But the memory of that youthful idealism only serves to highlight her current powerlessness, her inability to effect change. ‘[ … ] [Y]ou don’t see how, / How what you could do or say / Could, in effect, change anything / Because it seems as if everything is chaos: / Regulated, despairing chaos. / Chaos. / It hurts. You know?’ (p. 35).
She cries at a supermarket checkout, thinking ‘[a]bout the history of radical progressive liberal [politics in] Western capitalist and late capitalist democracies’ (p. 36), and is belittled by the priggish manager. Patronized and despairing, she returns home with her GMO rice and pumpkin seeds sodden with tears.
The character’s delivery is direct and personal. We, her audience, are her confidantes as she confesses to needing love, graphic un-forming love – a love that tears the world apart and re-forms it in a kiss, love the redeemer: ‘Aren’t we something in love?’ she asks of us. Though whether her question is rhetorical or one that demands our answer, we don’t know. Has she ever loved, been loved? Surely in her glorious punky Doc Martens days there was someone; someone that fractured reality, if only for an instant.
In an effort to be something, an agent of change, she attends a rally for ‘Pea