Description
Book SynopsisJARMAN (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.
Trade Review'Caridad Svich is one of the finest poet/playwrights of this generation. By this I don’t just mean she is a poet and a playwright, but she is a playwright whose plays perform like dramatic poems that are wondrous to the ear and moving to the heart. '
-- Seth Gordon, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis
'Within these plays, Svich has juxtaposed the magical and the mundane to create passionate collages which, though beautiful and lyrical, have a radical punk intensity. For simmering beneath the poetic of her work flows a palpable anger at the ways of this world. But, though punk and angry, her plays are not nihilistic, they are paeans to hope in hopeless times. Svich is more than a dramatist, she is a force of nature. The plays within this volume, representative of a crux shift in her development as a playwright, are testament to her continuing belief in the power of theatre to affect change in a philistine age.'
-- Ian Rowlands, playwright and director
'JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) is a sensuous meditation on memory and the transgressive imagination – a poetic encounter fired by the rage and beauty of queerness.'
-- Chris Megson, Royal Holloway, University of London
'Playwright Caridad Svich's The Orphan Sea is a symphonic journey through time, space, location, memory, love, longing, waiting, and being. Drawing on the ancient myth, Odysseus and Penelope's tale of passion becomes visceral as the play envelops the audience in a current day poetic embrace.'
-- M. Heather Carver, Professor of Theatre, University of Missouri-Columbia
Table of ContentsBeautiful Strangeness: The Plays of Caridad Svich
Kevin Brown ‘When I think of him, I think of angels’: Introducing JARMAN (all this maddening beauty)
Theron Schmidt Performing JARMAN (all this maddening beauty)
John Moletress JARMAN (all this maddening beauty)
Caridad Svich Laying Siege to Carthage
Pedro de Senna Carthage/Cartagena: when I looked up I looked for something (call it hope)
Caridad Svich On the Act of Regarding Another: Some Thoughts on Live Performance, Silence, and Fragility
Caridad Svich The Orphan Sea
Caridad Svich
