Sui Generis

I am pretty sure that I met the most unique and lovely writer, Caridad Svich, over thirty years ago, in 1994, in the PlayLab’s Festival at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis.

She presented a beautiful poetic, dramatic piece of art called ‘Alchemy Of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues’, which was directed by another soon-to-be great friend, Lisa Peterson.

I remember that it partly took place in a swamp, was about a dead soldier, who also appeared in the play, and had original songs that Caridad wrote.

One of its themes involved fried chicken, and actors were walking around with Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets for shoes.

It was intensely wonderful for someone as lucky as I was to see a work so lyrical and full of image like this striking play, which did a number on me. Freeing me in so many ways.

Caridad, as I would later learn, was one of the first artists to be mentored by Maria Irene Fornes in the legendary playwrights workshop at INTAR in NYC in the 1990’s.

I remember that in those days of PlayLab’s, run by the playwright, Jeffrey Hatcher, the playwright would read their own work aloud to everyone in the room as a kind of first ritual of development.

I know it can sound like a performance terror to a writer, but Caridad was a revelation in this process.

She seemed to me to be channeling her play rather than reading it, and when she broke into her songs, a cappella, a spirit seemed to enter the room.

She was sitting at a table facing us, and it was like going to church.

At some point, we were all having breakfast and she mentioned that she had an obsession with Hallmark greeting cards, and that she was going to walk to a Hallmark store nearby. She asked me if I wanted to come.

I had already spent close to a decade traveling around the country, sleeping on people’s floors as part of the poetry and performance art communities.

Theatre was a slightly more refined experience. We were in the dorms at the University of Minnesota and one of our memorable activities was a trip to the Mall of America.

I walked with Caridad and I asked where she was from. She said that her parents lived in a place called South Gate. I told her we had a South Gate, a city seven miles from downtown Los Angeles, and she said that was the city!

I liked her so much after that. Pieces of a Caridad puzzle were always being filled in for me.

When Diane Rodriguez and I took over the Latino Theatre Initiative at the Mark Taper Forum Theater, we welcomed Caridad as a writer-in-residence through an NEA/TCG grant. Caridad was her own special creation, and pretty much did her own thing at the Taper. She was a fantastic presence, as we wrestled with the challenges of that period.

We’ve just known each other now for a very long time. I follow her life and work, and I am happy to have intersected in lovely moments throughout our careers.

I think she had me on a panel at the University of Arizona for a conference once where our van broke down and we spent an afternoon at a Waffle House waiting for help. The stuff of theatre.

Anyway. She is a prolific playwright, scholar, translator, editor and songwriter/lyricist, among her many gifts, with a body of work consisting of over a hundred plays, and forty translations to her credit!

If you’re wondering, she is Cuban, Argentine, Spanish and Croatian.

She is the founder of NoPassport, an important press for adventurous works, among many things. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of an Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement, among her many awards, all of which she wonderfully deserves.

She is a language artist who writes through immense feeling and topic. She is a dreamcatcher. She is in the avant garde, in that she is at the forefront of idea, poetry as dramatic expression, and a wonderfully political citizen.

She is a unique human being. I think she’s great and full of so much life. And it is her birthday.

Happy Birthday, Caridad Svich.