NoPassport Theatre Alliance Honors Veterans with SPARK at Stephen Foster Memorial, 11/12

To honor veterans of wars both recent and past and to promote a spirit healing and recovery, NoPassport theatre alliance and press presents a series of free readings in collaboration with multiple venues across the US throughout the month of November.

Spark is a play about three sisters living in the US and caught in the mess of a recent war's aftermath. It is about what happens when soldiers come home and when women of little economic means must find a way to make do and carry on. It is also about the strength of family. Spark is many things, but ultimately it is a contemporary story of faith, love, trauma, and healing.

Playwright Caridad Svich is a US Latina playwright, translator, lyricist, and editor. She is an alumna playwright of New Dramatists, founder of NoPassport theatre alliance & press, associate editor of Routledge/UK's Contemporary Theatre Review, Drama Editor of literary journal Asymptote, and contributing editor of TheatreForum.

Lisa Jackson-Schebetta – director of last year's smash hit Sweeney Todd and this year's Her Hamlet – returns to spearhead Pittsburgh's presentation of this national reading scheme. Jackson-Schebetta has directed and devised works for the American Globe Theatre and The Women's Project and Productions, among others.

Concurrent with this reading is a secondary response to the veteran's experience. On November 18, Pitt Rep will present a staged reading of Quiara Allegria Hudes' play Elliot: A Soldier's Fugue, directed by Christiana Molldrem Harkulich.

Tracing the legacy of war through three generations of a Puerto Rican family, the play focuses on nineteen-year-old Elliot, a recently anointed hometown hero who returns from Iraq with a leg injury and a difficult question: Will he go back to war a second time? While on leave, Elliot learns the stories of his father and grandfather who served in Korea and Vietnam before him.

Spark will play the Henry Heymann Theatre, in the Stephen Foster Memorial, 4200 Fifth Ave on Monday, November 12, 7pm. Free and Open to the Public. For more information, visit www.play.pitt.edu.

The University of Pittsburgh's Department of Theatre Arts (founded in 1982) offers BA, MA, MFA and PhD degrees in Theatre Arts. All faculty members are active in teaching, research, and artistic projects. The University of Pittsburgh Repertory Theatre is the department's flagship theatre company with performance spaces in the landmark Stephen Foster Memorial and the Cathedral of Learning.

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