Analyzing Plays: Latine Voices

Class Description

Instructors: Caridad Svich Semester: Fall 2026 (Tuesdays) Session: 10 Online Sessions New Students: $400 Returning PlayPenn or DGI Students: $350 Foundry & Entrepreneur Members: $320 DGI Certificate Students: $320 Discover how Latine artists turn history, identity, memory, and imagination into unforgettable theatre. "Analyzing Plays: Latine Voices" explores a range of works and performances by Latine theatre-makers with ancestral connections to the Caribbean, Latin America, Central America, and South America. This course will provide students with new ways to think about how theatre works, why artists make the choices they do, and how different theatrical approaches can shape an audience's experience. The course is perfect for playwrights, actors, directors, dramaturgs, and devising artists who want to challenge conventional approaches to dramatic structure and discover new ways of constructing and reading plays. In this course, students will: 1) Explore a wide range of approaches, from documentary, protest, surrealist theatre as well as the use of music, film, and diverse forms of performance; 2) Read, analyze, and discuss each assigned work, looking closely at how different artists build their stories and create meaning onstage; 3) Explore works by Lola Arias, Migdalia Cruz, Guillermo Calderón, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Naomi Iizuka, Manuela Infante, Maria Irene Fornés, José Rivera, Luis Valdez, and Patricia Ybarra. At the heart of the course is a simple question: What becomes possible when we allow ourselves to think differently about how a play can be made? By examining different approaches to composition and the overall architecture of works made for live and hybrid performance, theatre-makers can expand their writing, analytical, or performance “toolbox.” WEEK 1: Contextualising Latine Plays WEEK 2: The Land and the Individual and the Class Struggle WEEK 3: The Land and History and Documenting Lives WEEK 4: Protest and History and the musical WEEK 5: Fragmentation of Selves and Historical Erasure WEEK 6: Layering the Tectonic Plates WEEK 7: Hollywood and Images of Latinidad WEEK 8: Identities and Image-Making WEEK 9: Dream Logic and the Ache of the Surreal WEEK 10: Non-Human Performance and Plant-urgy CARIDAD SVICH is a playwright, poet, translator and editor. She teaches writing at Rutgers University NYU and the Einhorn School of Performing Arts. She is Artistic Director of New Play Program at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York City.