In a series of interviews with fifty playwrights from the US and UK, this book offers a fascinating study of the voices, thoughts, and opinions of today's most important dramatists. Filled with probing questions, Fifty Playwrights on their Craft explores ideas such as how does playwriting help a global dialogue; where do dramatists find the ideas that become the stories and narratives within their plays; how can the stage inform the writer's creative process; how does crossing boundaries between art forms push the living art form of theatre-making forward; and will there be playwrights in another 50 years? Through these interrogating interviews we come to understand how and why playwrights write what they do and gain insight into their processes and motivations. Together, the interviews provide an inter-generational dialogue between dramatists whose work spans over six decades. Featuring interviews with playwrights such as Edward Bond, Katori Hall, Chris Goode, David Greig, Willy Russell, David Henry Hwang, Alecky Blythe, Anne Washburn and Simon Stephens, Jester and Svich offer an unprecedented view into the multiple perspectives and approaches of key playwrights on both sides of the Atlantic.

Featuring conversations with theatre makers in the US and UK during the first 8 months of the Covid-19 lockdown, this collection reveals the innovations in digital theatre as artists, companies and theatres had to adjust to the restrictions and formulate new ways of working and reaching audiences. Besides documenting in their own words the work that was generated, this book captures the artists' dreams for a new post-Covid reality in which theatre is reimagined and issues of racial and economic injustice are addressed. With conversations grouped under 5 broad areas, a host of theatre makers candidly discuss the present and the future of theatre: * R/evolution: How should theatre evolve rather than re-set? What kind of field could this be, if the arts sector is to survive in the US and UK and if white supremacist, classist, ableist, and patriarchal structures are dismantled, and acts of regeneration and reformation occur? * What does theatre look like at the local and hyper-local level and when working with young people and communities at risk? * What are the challenges of creating work in the digital realm and/or exploring socially distanced performance in new ways? * How may theatre address social inequalities and be a place for acts of political and artistic resistance? How has the pandemic galvanised their commitments to communities, arts advocacy, use of languages on the stage and page, and considerations of the living archive? * Acts of communion with audiences, readers, fellow artists, students, and within ensembles and collectives. How do we find new ways to gather and make when liveness and the shared experience are challenged?

A wide-ranging look at the state of contemporary theatre practice, economics, and issues related to identity, politics, and technology. Contains a snapshot dissection of where theatre is, where it has been and where it might be going through the voices of established and emerging theatre artists and scholars from the UK, US and elsewhere. Offers an examination of how to make theatre in a time of crisis and why it is a vital form of communication are at the heart of the book's mission. Asks questions such as: where is theatre now taking place?; what is the relationship between play and performance?; how does funding work?; what states does theatre flourish under?; and if there is a current 'crisis of theatre' should it not be seen as a welcome opportunity to develop a vigorous 'theatre of crisis'?. The international list of contributors includes Jim Carmody, Phyllis Nagy, Michael Billington, Max Stafford-Clark, Peter Sellars, Dragan Klaic, Goat Island, Erik Ehn and many others, making up a vast array of practising artists, thinkers, and scholars. -- .

This book provides a forum for a wide range of theatre, music and performance artists to talk about where they stand in relation to new technologies, intercultural collaborations, and the making of interdisciplinary work. Looking at how time, space and memory play an active role in shaping different artistic visions, editor Caridad Svich has gathered the voices of unique and dynamic artists including Tim Etchells, Rinde Eckert, Richard Foreman, Peter Gabriel, David Greig, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Phelim McDermott and Peter Sellars as a way to examine the impact of globalisation on the creation and development of new work.

'... love creates something that was not there before.' - Hedwig John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask's Hedwig and the Angry Inch opened on Valentine's Day,1998, in New York City, and ever since, it and its genderqueer heroine have captivated audiences around the world. As the first musical to feature a genderqueer protagonist as its lead, the show has had an extraordinary life on film, Broadway and in the music field. A glam rock musical with a complex relationship to issues related to art, eroticism and matters of identity formation, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a darkly exuberant fairy tale about a child that discovers she is one of a kind, but also potentially among her own kind, if she dares travel past borders that confine and try to stabilise her being and identity. Caridad Svich examines this exhilarating work through the lenses of visual and vocal rock 'n' roll performance, the history of the American musical, and its positioning within LGBTIQ+ theatre.

Caridad Svich offers a new take on the history play, which tells the story of Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn. Shakespeare's Henry VIII is a story of a brazen race to power and the desire for an heir. Advised by Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII is caught between church and state as he meets Anne Boleyn and seeks to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine. This episodic and plot-driven play examines the machinations of royal power. Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in this new translation by Caridad Svich, is a swift-moving, complex tale of intrigue. This translation of Henry VIII was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and Other Plays is a collection of three radically poetic works for live performance by OBIE award-winning playwright Caridad Svich. The playtexts include a lyrical meditation on the legacy of iconic queer artist Derek Jarman, a meditation on displacement and human suffering (Carthage/Cartagena) and an intimately operatic reflection on Penelope and Odysseus (The Orphan Sea). Accompanied by scholarly essays placing the plays in context, this book showcases the beautiful strangeness and profound resistance in Svich's work.

Featuring conversations with theatre makers in the US and UK during the first 8 months of the Covid-19 lockdown, this collection reveals the innovations in digital theatre as artists, companies and theatres had to adjust to the restrictions and formulate new ways of working and reaching audiences. Besides documenting in their own words the work that was generated, this book captures the artists' dreams for a new post-Covid reality in which theatre is reimagined and issues of racial and economic injustice are addressed. With conversations grouped under 5 broad areas, a host of theatre makers candidly discuss the present and the future of theatre: * R/evolution: How should theatre evolve rather than re-set? What kind of field could this be, if the arts sector is to survive in the US and UK and if white supremacist, classist, ableist, and patriarchal structures are dismantled, and acts of regeneration and reformation occur? * What does theatre look like at the local and hyper-local level and when working with young people and communities at risk? * What are the challenges of creating work in the digital realm and/or exploring socially distanced performance in new ways? * How may theatre address social inequalities and be a place for acts of political and artistic resistance? How has the pandemic galvanised their commitments to communities, arts advocacy, use of languages on the stage and page, and considerations of the living archive? * Acts of communion with audiences, readers, fellow artists, students, and within ensembles and collectives. How do we find new ways to gather and make when liveness and the shared experience are challenged?

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.

By turns astonishing, fierce, and tender, these seven plays by Latina-American dramatist Caridad Svich highlight more than two decades of boundary-breaking and genre-defying dramatic work. Populated by characters struggling to survive, these plays are joined by thematic threads of loss, remembrance, resurrection, grave wit, and heroic survival.
The centerpiece of this collection, "Instructions for Breathing," is a lyrical, dreamlike meditation on responsibility and parenthood that asks an audience not only to suffer the unthinkable loss of a child as Svich's characters do, but also to laugh at the couple's flaws and at the hilarity of the suburban life they lead. This commingling of emotion happens in each of these dramatic portraits of homeless castaways ("Fugitive Pieces"), women in war ("Thrush"), and sex traffickers ("Rift"). And Svich's work is not without a nod to the classical: "Wreckage "reframes the story of Medea and "Steal Back Light from the Virtual" depicts a labyrinthine society torn apart by a monstrous beast. In sum, ""Instructions for Breathing" and Other Plays" serves as an illuminating introduction to the work of a major playwright and an inspiring example of the breadth of possibilities in North American drama.