The Hour of All Things and Other Plays

By Caridad Svich

Four plays by playwright/theatre-maker Caridad Svich (OBIE for Lifetime Achievement) – The Hour of All Things, The Breath of Stars, Upon the Fragile Shore and Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge) – explore the rough and necessary waters of citizenship under the effects of globalization and threads of human connection across multiple geographic landscapes. The Hour of All Things tells the story of an ordinary person trying to figure out how to take a stand against systemic oppression; The Breath of Stars is a radical, atomized reconfiguration of Shakespeare’s The Tempest seen through the lens of global capitalism in the digital age. Upon the Fragile Shore spans the stories of individuals in eighteen countries to focus on human-made environmental and human tragedies and their effects. Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge) looks at the tough and tender lives of immigrants and their adult children in Detroit as they struggle to relocate the power of myth in their everyday lives. With 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 settle the complex and thorny questions of existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect
• Release date: Jan 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783208500

Book preview

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, 6th Flr, NY, NY 10003 USA. Email: [e-mail] or New Dramatists alumni desk, 424 West 44th Street, NY, NY 10036 USA.

Email: [e-mail]

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)

In 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 ‘Peace and Justice’. There, she meets an Anarchist who unnerves her liberal self: ‘Look, I’m all for kicking against the pricks, / But I’m also here because we’re talking about / Improving the ethical foundations of human societies: / Toward listening, caring and becoming – / A DEEP ECOLOGY OF BEING’ (p. 49–50, original capitalization). The protest ends in an unethical tear gassing; all are terrorists now; the enemy is both without and within. In a police holding cell, she wets herself. Her incontinence, her final shame.

The eighth portrait takes the form of a fable. It is interesting to note that the use of juxtaposing fables is a frequent device in Svich’s work. It places the commonplace in mythological relief, thereby elevating and dignifying small lives; it democratizes history. The fable is a tale of a future being who tries to decipher fragments of a script written ‘by a soul begging the earth for mercy’ (p. 56) – the prayers of a long dead nobody.

The Hour of All Things is tender, daring and painfully honest. Only the dramatists know to what extent it is autobiographical, one can only guess. Though, in truth, it pains one to guess, for it demands an element of schadenfreude to bear witness to such hopelessness. ‘When I was a child I used to dream about a river. / That could carry all of the hopes of the earth / Along its currents, and wind its way through a land / That had long since given up its ambitions of empire’ (p. 54). Such a river would by necessity be a scouring torrent before it could ever be a benign current.

In a HowlRound post, Svich wrote,

A colleague tells me my plays are too sad. ‘When are you going to write a happy play?’ I have nothing against joy. I carry it with me on a daily basis […] But even though I know Aristophanes was making stuff alongside Euripides and even attacked him mercilessly in The Frogs, I side with Euripides.

(2015)

Put succinctly, ‘We are Euripides’ children’.

In the keynote address Svich made before the 6th annual Graduate Theatre Syndicate Symposium at Ohio State University, Svich stated,

Makers from the past are as much kin to me in the art of writing as are my peers in the field […] [W]hen I write, I feel as if they are all with me […]. Making theatre is a spiritual endeavor. Its religion is not organized, but rather assembled from kinships with theatre tribes across time.

(2014)

Theatre, according to Svich, is therefore both a reflexive and a prophetic form. ‘The mythic sense of ourselves is what theatre, at its best, shows us […] Mythic time is present time, and the present flashes by us in an instant’. The person that chooses the path of the myth-maker finds his or her place in the eternal continuum. That person becomes shaman, a myth-maker who never puts a price on his or her imagination, for a Shaman imagines for all, and for all time. It demands sacrifice. To be a myth maker is not to compromise, it is to be a revolutionary. As Euripides risked all when he criticized Athens for its brutality at the siege of Scione, Svich likewise risks all with her honest, brave plays that challenge the consensual. Some are ‘well made’, as in, they have ‘capital’ and therefore pleasing to the gatekeepers of the American Stage. Increasingly, however, her plays are prickly awkward beasts, very well made, culturally intertextual, but almost un-American. Following a workshop of This Thing of Ours (2014) in a mid-West theatre, Svich explained to me in a private conversation shortly thereafter that a director commented, ‘I love this, but where would it live?’, to which Svich replied ‘On stage’. Svich is not writing the American Dream, she is re-dreaming America through innovate works that challenge the norm of exceptionalism, of which The Hour of All Things is an example.

Svich curated a series of essays upon innovation in theatre to coincide with the 2014 Theatre Communications Group (TCG) National Conference. These were subsequently collated into one volume, Innovation in 5 Acts (2015). In the essay, Considering Imagination, practitioner Katie Pearl, writes,

In our system the focus is on the market – on objects that can be sold. So as artists, we have gotten used to thinking that our value is attached to our objects. our plays either as scripts or as productions. That is our capital.²

(2015: 61)

However, capital is only ‘capital’ if it is a dollar worth to the system. The American Stage is a philistine one; a reductive system.³ It knows the worth of all but the value of nothing. Svich resists reduction, and her resistance grows. Her innovative and innovating works could be perceived as increasingly un-marketable. However, they are the paeans of an eco-dramatist who holds nothing back in her criticism of the supranational. Yes, Svich has bills to pay, but with growing anger, she resists paying the piper.

*

In 2012, Svich stated in a web posting on HowlRound:

As a writer, for many years, my work for the theater has been notably marked by its hyperlinked dramaturgy. I feel that, for now anyway, the ‘electric’ is exhausted and exhausting and speaking culturally all the time at me, at us, at everyone 24/7. Onstage, what I yearn for more than anything these days, as audience and practitioner, is the joyous delight in bareness, in stripped-down theatrics, and unapologetically humanist expressions of art-making that still strive for and live in the poetic realm.

(Svich 2012)

The irony of this statement is that it was posted a year before Svich was to write The Breath of Stars (2013) (no doubt the play was already forming in her mind). It is the most ‘electric’ text contained within this volume, if not within her oeuvre.

In the direction it states that ‘this text is an invitation to dream’. In truth, it is a challenge to a theatre-maker to be innovative to the point of jouissance –: a final orgy of digitalization before a return journey to more ‘acoustic’ expressions. It is Prospero’s books defying the fire; a dare to theatre directors, ‘you want hyperlinked dramaturgy, how hyperlinked dare you go?’.

The Breath of Stars is a forensic exploration of the nature of memory and love in a suspended, godless realm; that fluid interface between the real and the digital. Svich has created a virtual-memory theatre where all is knowable, but simultaneously unknowable – a touch of Žižek’s Rumsfeld!⁴ ‘She is looking at his altar. / She: I am looking at his altar / In the memory theater of this FB page / And the Twitter feed archive of your last days, / Last things, / Last fucks on the raging earth of our aching everything’ (Svich, 2013). In that oxymoronic reality/unreality, characters try to re-construct themselves from echoes of memory. Prospero’s island is now a non-land: a virtual city of strings; lines connect everyone, but no one is connected either with themselves or with others, ‘We have messed things up / In a big