The National New Play Network Announces 30th Rolling World Premiere: GUAPA by Caridad Svich

The NATIONAL NEW PLAY NETWORK (NNPN), the country's alliance of non-profit theaters that champions the development, production, and continued life of new plays, announces its 30th Rolling World Premiere: Caridad Svich's Guapa will receive three productions through the Network's Continued Life of New Plays Fund in the 2012/13 season, the Network's 15th. Guapa will begin its Rolling World Premiere at Borderlands Theater (Tucson, AZ, October 5 – 21), followed by performances at Miracle Theatre Group (Portland, OR, March 22 – April 13) and Phoenix Theatre (Indianapolis, IN, spring dates TBA).

ABOUT THE PLAY
In a small Texas town long fractured by class struggle and racism, a single mother named Roly works to give her makeshift family a shot at their dreams. Together they adopt a young woman named Guapa ("beautiful"), who wants nothing more than to play women's soccer. With her hallmark lyricism and political commitment, Svich has written a border-fantasy filled with magical sports dreams, graffiti, birds in flight, indigenous history, trauma, recovery, and the possibility of a better life.

ABOUT Caridad Svich
Caridad Svich is a US Latina playwright, translator, lyricist and editor whose works have been presented across the US and abroad at diverse venues, including the Denver Center, Mixed Blood Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Repertorio Espanol, 59East59, McCarren Park Pool, 7 Stages, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, Teatro Mori (Santiago, Chile), ARTheater (Cologne), and Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK. She received the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the novel by Isabel Allende, and has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama three times, including in 2010 for Instructions for Breathing. Her key works include 12 Ophelias, Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man's Blues, Iphigenia...A Rave Fable, Love in the Time of Cholera (based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez' novel), The Way of Water, and the multimedia collaboration The Booth Variations. An alumna of New Dramatists, she holds an MFA in Theatre-Playwriting from UCSD, and has taught creative writing and playwriting at Bard College, Barnard College, Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Yale School of Drama.

ABOUT BORDERLANDS THEATRE
Borderlands Theater is a professional theater company recognized nationally and internationally tor the development and production of theater and educational programs that reflect the diversity of the voices of the US/Mexico border region. Although focusing on the Latino/Chicano/Mexicano voice as the core voice to nurture and support, Borderlands works interactively with all voices of the region. The "border," both as physical and social landscape, is a metaphor for Borderlands' work. The metaphor allows, invites and even demands, both a regional and an international understanding of what it represents. Border people, in the best sense of the word, are citizens of the world.

ABOUT MIRACLE THEATRE GROUP
The Miracle Theatre Group has been dedicated to bringing the vibrancy of Latino theatre to the Northwest community and beyond for more than 27 years. In addition to its national tours, Miracle provides a home for Spanish and Latin American arts and culture at El Centro Milagro, where it enriches the local community with a variety of community outreach projects and educational programs designed to share the diversity of Latino culture. For more information about the Miracle Theatre Group, visit www.milagro.org or call 503-236-7253.

ABOUT The Phoenix Theatre
The Phoenix Theatre is Indiana's only professional Contemporary Theatre, and has presented productions to challenge and entertain the Indianapolis community for 29 years. An Equity house, the Theatre presents the Midwest and Indiana premieres of many popular Broadway and Off-Broadway plays, and has presented more than 83 world premieres in its quarter century. The Phoenix Theatre is a member of the League of Indianapolis Theatres and is supported by the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as local corporate and foundation funders and more than 400 individual donors.