Innovation in Five Acts: Strategies for Theatre and Performance

Editor Caridad Svich has gathered forty-one essays from admired theater professionals that comprise a volume of inspiring and innovative techniques for creating theater. Inside are words of wisdom and advice from experienced playwrights, directors, performers, teachers, dramaturgs, artistic directors and founders--each sharing the creative challenges and triumphs of developing original works for today’s stages.

＂In this edited collection, more than forty practitioners and scholars voice their whimsical, fiery, deeply impassioned, political, funny, sometimes elegiac and stinging words prompted by a call to write about ＂artistic innovation.＂

With intelligence, thoughtfulness, rigor and wit, author after author offer their considered take on the subject, unlocking new perspectives, unearthing old ones, and in general, doing what artists do best when they are walking on ground they trust and among colleagues who are not sitting before them in continual and sometimes stultifying judgment--and that is, open our eyes, hearts and minds again.＂
- Caridad Svich, from the Introduction

Contributors Include:
Ayad Akhtar; Deborah Asiimwe; Elaine Avila; Arthur Bartow; Gary D. Beckman; John Biguenet; Daniel Brunet; Leila Buck; Maddy Costa; Dominic D’Andrea; Pedro de Senna; Julie Felise Dubiner; Daniel Gallant; Michael John Garces; Anne Garcia-Romero; Jim Hart; David Herskovits; Rachel Jendrzejewski; John Jesurun; Mariana Carreno King; Zac Kline; Aaron Landsman; E.M. Lewis; Catherine Love; Oliver Mayer; Jeff McMahon; Emily Mendelsohn; John Moletress; Kali Quinn; Katie Pearl; Jeremy Pickard; Duska Radosavljevic; Ian Rowlands; Lisa Schlesinger; Howard Shalwitz; August Schulenburg; Mark Schultz; Andy Smith; Octavio Solis; Saviana Stanescu; Caridad Svich; Chris Wells; Heather Woodbury; Stephen Wrentmore

Caridad Svich received the 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement, the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize and has won the National Latino Playwriting Award sponsored by Arizona Theatre Company twice, including in the year 2013. Among her key works are 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart and The House of the Spirits (based on the Isabel Allende novel). Two collections of her plays are published by Seagull Books and Eyecorner Press. She has also edited several books on theatre and performance for TCG, Manchester University Press, BackStage Books, and Smith & Kraus. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, founder of NoPassport theatre alliance & press, and associate editor of Contemporary Theatre Review for Routledge, UK.