ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
Caridad Svich received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and NNPN rolling world premiere for Guapa, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based Isabel Allende’s novel. She has won the National Latino Playwriting Award (sponsored by Arizona Theatre Company) twice, including in the year 2013 for her play Spark. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times, including in the year 2012 for her play Magnificent Waste. Her works in English and Spanish have been seen at venues across the US and abroad, among them Arena Stage’s Kogod Cradle Series, Denver Center Theatre, 59E59, The Women’s Project, Woodshed Collective @ McCarren Park Pool, Repertorio Espanol, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Lighthouse Poole UK, Teatro Mori (Chile), Artheater-Cologne (Germany), Ilkhom Theater (Uzbekistan), Teatro Espressivo (Costa Rica), Welsh Fargo Stage (Wales), Homotopia Festival UK, SummerWorks festival in Toronto, and Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK.
ON WRITING AUNT JULIA
The following excerpt is taken from an essay that was first published online in the blog salon for Repertorio Espanol.
Parallel to this love story is another kind of love story - and that is the one between a writer and his craft and art. Pedro Camacho, the scriptwriter, is one of the novel’s most extravagant and memorable creations; he is the prototype of the “mad genius,” and he also serves as Mario’s mentor, and the story’s elastic heart. If Mario represents a kind of lightness, or perhaps even the callowness of youth, then Camacho is the story’s mysterious, volatile darkly comic, melancholic center. The writer of radio dramas that in this day we might call “pulp” stories or associate chiefly with the form that has become “telenovelas,” Camacho is a figure that disrupts, with his storytelling, the status quo. He rages against a society of spectacle and moreover, one that wishes to tie art’s function to a profit motive. Camacho rails against society and his own impulses. He is the play’s sad clown and Quixote figure, albeit with elements of both Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Mario, the budding writer who becomes his protege, is the refractive lens through which we see this complex man. Of course, the play and the novel on which it is based rests on Julia - a strong, passionate, intelligent, sensual woman who is both of her time and very much ahead of her time. What can I say about her? She is something. She is, yes, something else. A force of nature. A powerful spirit. A muse to inspire us all. But at day’s end, a radiant, complicated woman who follows both her heart and mind, as she remakes her life.
ABOUT MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
Mario Vargas Llosa is an internationally renowned Peruvian writer who has captivated readers with his novels, and who was granted the Nobel Prize in 2010 for his literary achievements. His novels use his own experience and Peruvian history as the basis of their fictions, and in doing so interrogate the relation between truth and literature.
Mario Vargas Llosa discovered his vocation at an early age, when he rewrote the endings of his favorite children’s tales. His family was very supportive of his precocious talent, until his father, who he thought was dead, re-emerging into his life when he was 11 years old, imposing an authoritarian regime on his house, punishing him physically and mocking his writing. This difficult period in Llosa’s life is described in the autobiographical novel A Fish in the Water. This hardship only made strengthened Llosa’s passion, as it was a way to rebel against his father. After being sent to a military center, he wrote love letters to his colleague’s girlfriends, and pornographic short stories; an experience related in The Time of the Hero (La Ciudad y los Perros).
After he went to San Marcos University in Lima where he studied literature and law, he became part of the communist group ‘Cahuide’, and experienced a political awakening which would inspire the novel Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversaciones en la Catedral). Following this, he traveled to Madrid, where he worked various jobs to be able to survive with his wife, Julia Urquidi, who was also his maternal uncle’s sister-in-law. Following their breakup he would dedicate his book Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In 1970, with the support of his editor, Vargas Llosa decided to dedicate his life to just being a writer. He was also involved in politics, and he was a candidate for the presidency of Peru in 1990, but was defeated by Alberto Fujimori.
Vargas Llosa lists one of his main influences as Flaubert, who helped him realize which kind of writer he would like to be. He was fascinated by his care for the shape and the way he created a reality which was entirely persuasive.
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa...
“for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
Many Latin American authors are still not read or studied as much as their merit demands. Peru stands among the top of the literary pantheon in Latin America.
César Vallejo
César Vallejo was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright and journalist best remembered for his poetry, which was not only well known in Peru but worldwide. Sometimes called a surrealist poet, his work features universal themes of the human condition. His collections of poetry are translated in many different languages and studied around the world. He is largely considered Peru’s best poet.
José Carlos Mariategui
Born in in 1894, Mariategui was a writer, journalist, and political thinker from Peru who never finished high school. During his career, he worked for many Peruvian magazines and newspapers. In 1918, he founded the magazine Our Epoch with César Falcón where he criticized militarism and traditional politics. His most famous work is the Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, a collection of essays that still resonates today.
Abraham Valdelomar
Valdelomar was a Peruvian writer, poet, journalist, dramatist, essayist and playwright, considered one of Peru’s leading storytellers. He began his university studies at the University of San Marcos, but soon abandoned his studies to enter the world of politics and journalism. He was a prolific writer, publishing stories and poetry in different magazines. In 1916, he founded the literary magazine Colónida and published a collection of short stories.
José María Arguedas
José was a Peruvian novelist, poet and anthropologist, writing pieces in both Spanish and Quechua, the language spoken by the Incas. At the age of 20, he entered the Faculty of Arts at the National University of San Marcos. In 1933, he published his first short story, Warma kuyay. He later became a professor of Spanish and Geography. Arguedas is best remembered for his intimate portrayals of indigenous-Andean culture and his ability to mix Spanish and Quechua, depicting the indigenous in a different light than had been done previously.
Julio Ramón Ribeyro
Julio Ramón Ribeyro is best known for his short stories and has been published in English, Italian, German, French, Dutch and Polish. He studied Letters and Law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and in 1952 won a journalism scholarship that allowed him to study in Spain. His short stories are characterized by their ironic and pessimistic views and his use of dramatic irony.
Ricardo Palma
Born in Lima in 1833, Ricardo Palma was an author, scholar, librarian and politician, best known for his magnum opus the Tradiciones Peruanas and his Romantic themes and style of writing. Since childhood, Palma was very interested in politics and journalism, becoming the editor of a political satire newspaper in his early teens. After being exiled from Peru, Palma returned in style, publishing his first historical piece Annals of the Inquisition of Lima, which was quickly followed by a collection of poetry.
GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO
The period of the 1930s through the 1950s was known as radio’s Golden Age, where the radio was the central piece of furniture in the average family’s living room. Parents and children would gather around the radio to hear the latest installment of their favorite show.
Radio was the first broadcast medium. During this period a variety of new entertainment formats and genres were created for the new medium, many of which later migrated to television.
The broadcasts of live drama, comedy, music and news that characterize the Golden Age of Radio had a precedent in the Théâtrophone, commercially introduced in Paris in 1890 and available as late as 1932. It allowed subscribers to eavesdrop on live stage performances and hear news reports by means of a network of telephone lines. The development of radio eliminated the wires and subscription charges from this concept.
It was not until after the Titanic catastrophe in 1912 that radio for mass communication came into vogue. Radio was especially important during World War I as it was vital for air and naval operations. World War I brought about major developments in radio.
The great majority of pre-World War II live radio broadcasts are lost. Many were never recorded; few recordings antedate the early 1930s. Several of the longer running radio dramas have their archives complete or nearly complete. The earlier the date, the less likely it is that a recording survives.