Book Description

A Rave Fable. This play hurls one of Greek tragedy's most compelling sagas into a sleek netherworld of sex, drugs and trance music. Iphigenia is the daughter of a political celebrity who embraces sensuous excess with a transgendered glam rock star named Achilles in a desperate attempt to flee her inevitable fate. "Svich's text is a unique language spoken by beings that inhabit the intermediate world that she creates. It vacillates between poetry and realism, composing a theatrical intercultural dialogue that fuses aspects of modern Latin American slang with US media lingo and original rock lyrics." -Chiori Miyagawa, The Brooklyn Rail "Sacrificial women haunt the darkling world created by Caridad Svich in her bold play. It creates a transfixing vision of hell on earth, buttressed by Svich's fractured poetic voice and her unblinking laser gaze at the ethical costs of cheap labor and disposable celebrity. Svich cunningly twists our expectations of class and gender roles." -Kerry Reid, The Chicago Tribune "Caridad Svich's IPHIGENIA ... A RAVE FABLE is an exhilarating play. The narrative subtlety is what makes Svich's redux of Euripides's IPHIGENIA IN AULIS so stirring. Through video projections, throbbing music and brand-name chemicals may offer escape, they punish the soul. Svich's remarkable poetry and crackling words reveals that the ravers, now permanently numb, also want Iphigenia dead. A play of mythic power." -Mark Blankenship, Variety "Caridad Svich's play has gorgeous, drunken poetry ... This 'rave fable' re-invents the story of Agamemnon's doomed daughter as one of modern political exigency. In the chorus (of dead girls of Ciudad Juarez) Svich layers elegy and comedy, the shame and fear she feels for these lost girls. Svich makes the anonymous city stand in for the gods of ancient drama just as unforgiving, just as hungry, just as brutal." -Helen Shaw, N Y Sun"