Riffing on Euripides (and Other Things): Caridad Svich’s Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a Rave Fable)

Abstract

An Obie-winning playwright, Caridad Svich is also a noted adapter of Greek tragedy to our times. This essay focuses on one of her most daring adaptations, of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, in which she transfers the classic text to a contemporary Latin America of brutal dictatorships and gruesome feminicides. Preferring the term riff to adaptation, Svich improvises on Euripides to compose a wholly original take on the mythic character of Iphigenia.