AGUA DE LUNA (PSALMS FOR THE ROUGE) is a new play by Caridad Svich that traces the personal lives of three couples living in southwest Detroit. Written in close-ups snapshots of ache, hunger, passion and hope, the play speaks to the search for a bit of magic in the everyday. This play premiered at Matrix Theatre Company in Detroit, which commissioned the piece. This is a Santa Catalina Editions publication.
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.
UPON THE FRAGILE SHORE is a play for four actors by Caridad Svich that explores human rights and environmental issues around the world especially in relationship to human-made tragedies and their aftermath. The play centers on stories from the United States, Nigeria, Syria, Malaysia, sub-Sahara, and Venezuela. Seven interlocking stories. Fourteen characters played by four actors. All of us living on the fragile shore. A play-conversation about tragedy, hope, faith, and who we are as audience.
SPARK is a play by Caridad Svich about three sisters living in the US caught in the mess of a recent war's aftermath. It is about what happens when soldiers come home, when women of little economic means must find a way to make do and carry on, and the strength, ultimately, of family. A contemporary US story of faith, love, war, trauma, and a bit of healing.
Horace G. Danner’s A Thesaurus of English Word Roots is a compendium of the most-used word roots of the English language. As Timothy B. Noone notes in his foreword: “Dr. Danner’s book allows you not only to build up your passive English vocabulary, resulting in word recognition knowledge, but also gives you the rudiments for developing your active English vocabulary, making it possible to infer the meaning of words with which you are not yet acquainted. Your knowledge can now expand and will do so exponentially as your awareness of the roots in English words and your corresponding ability to decode unfamiliar words grows apace. This is the beginning of a fine mental linguistic library: so enjoy!” In A Thesaurus of English Word Roots, all word roots are listed alphabetically, along with the Greek or Latin words from which they derive, together with the roots’ original meanings. If the current meaning of an individual root differs from the original meaning, that is listed in a separate column. In the examples column, the words which contain the root are then listed, starting with their prefixes, for example, dysacousia, hyperacousia. These root-starting terms then are followed by terms where the root falls behind the word, e.g., acouesthesia and acoumeter. These words are followed by words where the root falls in the middle or the end, as in such terms as bradyacusia and odynacusis.. In this manner, A Thesaurus of English Word Roots places the word in as many word families as there are elements in the word. This work will interest linguists and philologists and anyone interested in the etymological aspects of English language.
The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of Santo Domingo. Focusing on everyday forms of state domination, Lauren Derby describes how the regime infiltrated civil society by fashioning a “vernacular politics” based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race and class mobility. Derby argues that the most pernicious aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated quotidian practices such as gossip and gift exchange, leaving almost no place for Dominicans to hide or resist. Drawing on previously untapped documents in the Trujillo National Archives and interviews with Dominicans who recall life under the dictator, Derby emphasizes the role that public ritual played in Trujillo’s exercise of power. His regime included the people in affairs of state on a massive scale as never before. Derby pays particular attention to how events and projects were received by the public as she analyzes parades and rallies, the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following a major hurricane, and the staging of a year-long celebration marking the twenty-fifth year of Trujillo’s regime. She looks at representations of Trujillo, exploring how claims that he embodied the popular barrio antihero the tíguere (tiger) stoked a fantasy of upward mobility and how a rumor that he had a personal guardian angel suggested he was uniquely protected from his enemies. The Dictator’s Seduction sheds new light on the cultural contrivances of autocratic power.
"Previously published in the anthology Performed the here and now: an introduction to contemporary theater and performance edited by Chris Danowski ... and also in the independent literary journal CallReview (issue #2, 2004)"--T.p. verso.
