JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and other plays

Caridad Svich, Patrick Duggan

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783206223
• eBook ISBN: 9781783206247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

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 includes 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.

'Svich is one of the finest poet/playwrights of this generation. . . . 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

The Orphan Sea

Caridad Svich

The Figures

The ACTORS play:

The Odysseus chorus – those that cross rivers and seas

The Penelope chorus – those that wait for those who are crossing, and the one who searches for the lover long gone.

The chorus of the city – including the voice of the river, the neighbor, and the voice of the road.

Time: Now. And a memory of times before (mythic time).

Setting: A fluid space, one that can evoke river, road, city, ice floe, and a rock in the middle of the ocean.

Notes on Text and Staging

The play may be cast with as little as five, or as many as nine or more actors.

Although three choruses are listed, eventually ALL choruses are one. The delineation above is to help separate the different types of ‘music,’ as it were. Text in the play is not differentiated in regards to specific voices. Sometimes Penelope speaks alone, sometimes with chorus. Sometimes chorus is in unison, sometimes individualized, etc. Decisions regarding this should be made in the rehearsal process and should vary, depending on creative team involved in production.

In the first production, there were three actors in each chorus.

The play calls for a light (in spirit) approach, despite (at times) somber themes. The poetry should be handled, in other words, lightly, conversationally (albeit heightened). The space of play should be welcoming, rather than forbidding for the audience.

Movement, gesture, sound-score, and mediation should be part of the staging of this piece. If you read this and perhaps think of dance-theatre, or hybrid theatre, which includes new opera, then that would be a place to begin exploring the gestural world of the piece.

Music to the author’s lyrics for ‘The desperate song of no access’ has been written by Dani Mann and is available upon request, or the lyrics may be re-set by another composer.

Script History

This play was originally commissioned and produced in fall 2014 by the Department of Theatre at the University of Missouri at Columbia, Rhynsburger Theatre (Artistic Director Heather Carver) under the direction of Kevin Brown.

Invocation

(The actors speak with the audience.)

Here

On this earth

There are those that cross rivers and seas

There are those that wait for those that are crossing,

There are those that wait for their lovers to return,

Like Penelope once did for Odysseus all those years ago

Here

on this earth

There are also those who simply live

With the memory perhaps of waiting or having waited

With the memory perhaps of crossing or having crossed

These memories may wake them in the middle of the night

These memories may stir them to dig for their long-lost dead

These memories may make them wander the earth

In search of a time when they sat under the trees

Along the rivers and seas

And bathed in the glow of summer blossoms

Here

On this earth

There are those too who live in the land of wires

Those like us

Those like us

Who may feel from time to time

That they cannot trust the memories of the past

And must do all that they can to forget

That Penelope and Odysseus were ever here

And that there were/are wars

from which they were/must be return-ed

Here

On this earth

We speak a language plain

But sometimes too a language of sorrow

a language of bones and a language of song

Here

On this earth

Between the Tigris and Euphrates

(from which we have all come)

We make stories across rivers and seas

Some may last a few seconds

Others a lifetime, others may be only dreams

But they are all our stories.

1^st Movement: Crossings

1^st Prelude

(The following text may be heard (as VO, live, or pre-recorded) in the transition between the invocation and scene one.)

Later

This shivered world

Will speak

In tongues

Made of rock and sky

We will try to learn this language

We will fail

We will try again

Not until later, much later

Will we understand that

This new language

Cannot be learnt

Like other languages we were taught once

Its alphabet is not ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Beautiful 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
• Notes on Contributors
• Back Cover