Blasted Heavens: Five Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks

A collection of five daring, radical reconfigurations of ancient plays and myths by US playwright Caridad Svich, winner of a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement. From the mediatised archival landscape of the haunting Antigone Arkhe to the brutalised labyrinth-city of Steal Back Light from the Virtual to the eerie, broken universe of Wreckage, Svich burns through the core of mythic stories with a heightened sense of theatricality and ecstatic poetry. --- "Like rain when it's dry and ice cream in the summer - you can't say no to the writing of Caridad Svich; you need it, you deserve it. Her mind is generous and nimble; she is capable of subtlety at the highest levels of refinement, and is also inexhaustibly cruel (ice cream is cold as well as sweet). Svich does much here to crack the classic problems of the epic on stage - the epic is for her much more than an accumulation of event - it is the risk of the infinite. Here characters and stories continually threaten to spiritualize, yet ultimately remain in their blood." - Erik Ehn, playwright