A Play in Search of A Genius

Svich, Caridad. Iphigenia Crash Land Falls On The Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable). In Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks. Ed. Caridad Svich. New York: Backstage Books, 2005.

More people should read this play. It's a play with a great title and a lot of potential. I want to see it, and I want to see it done well. I want a collaboration between Luis Alfaro and Francesca Lia Block, possibly with help from the Butchlalis de Panochtitlan. I believe this play could be amazingly brilliant, but I'm torn. It requires a brilliant video artist, a brilliant sound designer, and a director with vision and a decent urban glam rave sensibility. Plus, there should be an awareness of both queer politics and Latino/Chicano issues and culture.

Apparently they did it at 7 Stages in Atlanta, which I hear has a good queer contingent, so that gives me some hope. There are some pictures here.

Anyway, the play seems totally fascinating, but it's also kind of hard to visualize because projections and music play such important roles in the production. It is in many ways about atmosphere and surface and I'm not entirely sure about what's below the surface but I think it feels right to me. The play is making comments about sacrifice, teenage sexuality, indulgence, and celebrity but it's not saying anything didactically, so it's hard to think about the point below the story and to distinguish that from tone and mood. I need to think about it more. I also need to read Euripedes Iphigenia so I know where Svich is coming from.

But this comes in a series of recent plays in which queer Chicano/a playwrights adapt Greek tragedies. I'd love to see a festival reminiscent of the ancient Greek festival of Dionysus in which three tragedies and one comedy were presented in the span of a single day as a trilogy of related themes. I would put Luis Alfaro's Electricidad at noon under the heat of an LA sun and the powerlines pulsing. Sunset would fall at the end of Cherrie Moraga's Hungry Woman and the rave of Svich's Iphigenia Crash Land Falls... would lead us into the dark. It would be a strange, beautiful experience.

But back to Iphigenia. There are some confusing vaguenesses in just reading the script and I'm not sure what some of the elements really mean. It references maquilladoras and desaparacidos and features a dictador that could be Juan Peron, Hugo Chavez, or George W. Bush, leaving a director or reader to infer what to make of these references. In fact, it felt very topical in terms of Dubya wrangling rebellious Bush twins. The male lead is supposedly a "transgender rock star" but it's unclear whether that means he's a transman or an effeminate biological male. In fact, I'm not sure whether its transgendered politics are in the right place at all, which is a big issue. Is this campy crossdressing or trans awareness? Why do they need to be transgendered; what does it mean? I still have a lot of questions about this play, but I very much want to see it done and done well.