←Recommendations of Hurt Song

We are pleased to support this play! It was a Finalist for the 2020 New Works Festival at Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas, Texas.

As with all the plays in Ms. Svich's American Psalm Cycle, Hurt Song digs deep into a part of the current American zeitgeist that few authors have been able to capture so completely and poetically. With tones of environmentalism, workers rights, displacement, human kindness and dignity, Svich hits hard at the core of what it is to live precariously at this moment of economic, moral, and political selfishness. Her poetry is moving and complex, and her world is rich and vibrant even in it's garbage-centered surroundings. Svich's truths are always profound, moving, and passionate, and Hurt Song is no exception.

There's a lot of hurt to be felt in HURT SONG. There's a lot of hope too. There's a lot to take in with the state of America and our decay and dehumanization. It's as if HURT SONG is that call to alarm for the forgotten of this country. Outside of our office and academic jobs are the suffering and the abandoned. Caridad Svich shows economic waste caused by land displacement and displacement from technological progress. Svich approaches a difficult subject and returns rightful dignity to the suffering in this magnificent, poetic drama about the lost and hopeless in America.

Svich rounds out her tetralogy with a tale of dwellers in an unloving land, where waste and work are all there is. Stevie dares to connect, but must balance hope with a necessary need to adapt, beleaguered by circumstance, location, and even family. This ability becomes both heartbreaking and inspiring. Friendships and bonds grow and shift against an apocalyptic setting. The onstage collapse of a character is not only one of the play's most striking moments, but a humbling metaphor, an amalgam of all that is struggling before our eyes in the cacophony of our country's strangled cries. Perfect poetry.