Caridad Svich (Playwright) received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and NNPN rolling world premiere for Guapa, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on Isabel Allende’s novel. She has won the National Latino Playwriting Award (sponsored by Arizona Theatre Company) twice, including in the year 2013 for her play Spark. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times, including in the year 2012 for her play Magnificent Waste. Her works in English and Spanish have been seen at venues across the US and abroad.

She sustains a parallel career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca, as well as works by Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Julio Cortazar, Victor Rascon Banda, Antonio Buero Vallejo, and contemporary works from Mexico, Cuba, and Spain. She teaches creative writing and playwriting at Rutgers University – New Brunswick and Primary Stages’ Einhorn School of Performing Arts. She has taught playwriting at Bard, Barnard, Bennington, Denison, Ohio State, ScriptWorks, UCSD, and Yale School of Drama. Website: http://www.caridadsvich.com

Arbor Falls is an exploration of “…life, love, the mess of all things human” (p. 49). A part of the American Psalm seven-play cycle, it is a poignant unfolding of what we believe to understand of a small town with an even smaller population that bears the weight of its dwindling community. Is it battling the lack of sustainability for the life they know and love, or is the true battle that of the preacher’s wavering faith?

Caridad Svich was born in the United States, with her parents being of Cuban, Argentine, Spanish, and Croatian descent. Svich, with her nuanced storytelling, explores the intersection of spirituality, morality, and the unraveling fabric of a close-knit community. Not unlike many of the plays she’s written, this play explores the idea of wander and migration as well as belief systems and spiritual emotions. With the fluidity of practice in a spiritual place not cemented by traditional religion, we see the folks of Arbor Falls explore whether their reality or what remains behind from their ancestors flows on forever or is easily blown away by the next strong gust of wind. Caridad Svich wrote, in the article “Economic Precarity and Resiliency in Theatre: an American Psalm,” “As a child of immigrant, working-class parents, I am inevitably drawn perhaps to stories about the disenfranchised and disaffected in our political landscape.”

As the director, cast, and production team dug through the layers buried between the lines of the text, we found that there was much more to this piece than an invitation of critical reflection toward an ambiguous religion; it also playfully, poetically, and in some moments painfully teeters around ambiguity to get you to critique, identify with, or reflect on, at any given moment, your own beliefs around political, social, and religious understandings and doings, among many other human realities. Arbor Falls is not too different from Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Dexter, or even Detroit. We share this world with you because in each of our worlds, there are “… no answers for how we can all seek kindness,” only commit oneself to seeking and giving.

~Shavonne Coleman, dramaturg

I have always loved how theatre allows us to practice walking in other people’s shoes. When I read Caridad Svich, I encounter a storyteller who requires me to practice seeing other folks in my shoes. Instead of the familiar temporary immersion in someone else’s story while ultimately knowing that I reside as myself and in my sphere, this playwright demands a kind of Advanced Neighborliness through imagining someone else laying claim to stories that I think belong to me.

This script from Caridad Svich’s American Psalm play series challenges us to accept that characters’ stories may be true for myriad embodiments or representations or identities of actors if we will choose to face our histories, chronologies, intersections, and the ambiguities of our religious pluralism. For me, Arbor Falls reflects how our national narrative claims a faith foundation when it’s convenient, and then denies religious embeddedness when it’s inconvenient. Svich challenges us to wrestle with the difficulty of that extraction and undercurrent. Simultaneously, the play celebrates that we can choose community and care: most character names reflect their role and relationship; they are framed in terms of what they contribute to the greater good, framed by what they are able to share. In naming only Cheyenne, Svich anchors the question of what it means to share space.

The delightful and diligent student cast, faculty and student designers, and wider production team imagined and collaborated and mirrored together, collaging contemporary life with ancestral echoes such as Caridad Svich conjures in her poetry. Our playwright weaves a sense of global locality/local globalism that holds the tension of placing hospitality to the outsider alongside taking care of home. Always, she invites us to practice what is true.

~Dr. Tiffany Trent

Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Drama

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