Town Hall

by Caridad Svich MFA '88

directed by Cambria Herrera

Performance Dates

February 18th, 19th, and 20th @ 7:30pm PST

Method of Presentation and Ticketing

The Cast

The Creative Team

About the Play

Town Hall is simultaneously an epic exploration and a plain old room to gather. Four actors playing searching characters, or maybe just themselves, guide us in dreaming...  From the comfort of our own living rooms, the performers offer us brutally honest conversation, memories of joy, secrets of shame, challenging questions, and their heart songs to reimagine how we behave in the theatre and the world. During a pandemic, can we even acknowledge all the suffering occurring around the world? If we try, do we have any belief left in us to imagine a brighter future? Can we still dream? Can we begin to form a plan for a better world? Town Hall questions how we are “us” and how we can move forward after all that’s happened.

About the Playwright

"As a playwright, songwriter, editor and translator living between many cultures, including inherited ones, the idea of departure has always been not only an actual or metaphorical basis for writing the work, but also an idea made manifest through the enactment of writing, its performance, and my living of it. Born in the US of Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents, I have felt in a strange kind of exile even while growing up as an “American.” This sense of dislocation extends to the fact that as a child and adolescent, I lived in several states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, New York, and California, not to mention many cross-country road trips in between. The nomadic strain was thus instilled in me and has become an inevitable part of my writing vision. Explorations of wanderlust, dispossession, biculturalism, bilingualism, construction of identity, and the many different emotional terrains that can be inhabited onstage form the basis of my plays and other writing projects. Visions of migration (both physical and spiritual) dominate the plays, which have become, in turn, documents of internal diasporas.As a playwright, songwriter, editor and translator living between many cultures, including inherited ones, the idea of departure has always been not only an actual or metaphorical basis for writing the work."

~Caridad Svich in “Visions of Migration” Performance Research

Read the July/August 2009 American Theatre  cover story on the playwright's website

Director's Statement

Welcome to a play about moving forward after everything that has happened. Welcome to a play-conversation where everyone has a small role to play, even you. Even if you sit here in silence, we’re putting our faith in you to listen and share this moment with us. 

If this pandemic has reinforced anything for me, it’s our interdependence on each other and our planet. Even though health orders have forced us to isolate, we’ve noticed more than ever, we are not alone, we are actually all in this together as a society. And we all have a small role to play in how we move forward. 

Admittedly, last summer I felt overwhelmed, lost, and uninspired to plan for this production on Zoom. And even now, it can be so hard to continue working when an estimated 2 Million+ people have died in the pandemic and the suffering only continues to grow. But in my fellow theatre artists, I see an unwavering belief in the power of gathering people together to plant a seed of inspiration within our hearts. 

I feel our world is in need of some radical healing and change, so I asked many of my classmates, “Do you believe theatre can change the world?” And while some took longer than others to admit it, every one of my colleagues eventually came to a similar answer, “Yes, it changed me. It can change some people. And some people can change the world.” 

The determination of my colleagues here at UCSD and Caridad Svich’s words shifted something in me. They gave me a way to look forward that I didn’t know could exist anymore.

We are gathering tonight to share Svich’s words with you, but just as much we are gathering to see each other, listen to each other, and maybe imagine something different for our collective needs. 

Thank you for being here, despite every overwhelming thing that could make you want to isolate, or disconnect, or disengage from each other and the work we might need to do together as a society. Your presence here matters and we’re ready to share a moment with you. 

Warmly,

Cambria Herrera

Director of Town Hall by Caridad Svich