Washington Post - Highly Recommended
"...Looking vulnerable in jeans and a blood-stained T-shirt, Miranda-Guzman's Alba often stands dazedly on the outskirts of scenes, watching her forebears interact. When she slips back into her own time, the production's evocation of detention and torture can be relatively intense. The leitmotif-like recurrence of the abuse scenes, and Svich's canny streamlining of Allende's epic plot, give the staged "House of the Spirits" a bracing, hard-eyed focus."
DC Theater Arts - Highly Recommended
"...Based on the pivotal, impassioned and ground-breaking novel by Chilean-American novelist, Isabelle Allende, La casa de los espíritus, or The House of Spirits, written by Caridad Svich and directed by Jose Zayas, exemplifies the spirit of Allende's novel through its magnetic dialogue, mystical undertones, and charismatic action that journeys through a narrative of generational curses, political turmoil, religious strife and misogynistic practice that is not only relative to the play's cultural setting, but also relays the intense conflict that lies within the stories of cultures across the world."
MetroWeekly - Highly Recommended
"...Naturally, as a production at GALA, The House of the Spirits is performed in Spanish with written English text superimposed on screens above the stage. It can be distracting to have to read the monitors, especially since this show is rich in dialogue. But even if you miss some of the finer details in the action or Koch's poignant projections, you'll be charmed all the same by such a spirited show."
Washington City Paper - Highly Recommended
"...For theatergoers who haven't seen a show at Gala Hispanic Theatre, La Casa de los Espíritus (The House of the Spirits) should prompt them to give theater in Spanish a try. Based on the 1982 novel by Isabel Allende and carefully adapted by Caridad Svich, the play traces 50 years and three generations of women in the troubled Trueba family. Although Svich is an established playwright, the show feels less like a fully realized play than a beautifully staged dramaturgical homage to Allende's story-rape, torture, revolution, a half-century of Chilean history, and all. There's a backdrop of cursive script at the rear of the stage, in front of which lie stacks of books and children's toys and other household props, all of them spray-painted white. Seven large picture frames hang from the ceiling and support translucent screens that provide additional projection surfaces. The English subtitles are projected even higher, on both sides of the stage."
MD Theatre Guide - Highly Recommended
"...Memory as presence. Narrative as place. Pain as protagonist. In Gala Theatre's visually chimerac production of the play based on Isabelle Allende's La Casa de los Espiritus/The House of the Spirits, we enter the consciousness of memory. Grey images flicker across seven translucent screens. A staircase beckons. A mantelpiece awaits. A garden with pink flowers appears. An earthquake shudders all visages. Text scrawls across the stage in indecipherable script. The theatrical space becomes fluid, a transparent liquid through which the epic tale will pass. This medium, we realize, is such stuff as dreams are made on."
DCTheatreScene - Highly Recommended
Throughout The House of the Spirits/La Casa de los Espiritus, I sat leaning forward, agog in the spell of Caridad Svich’s powerful, multi-layered play, enhanced by inspired acting and staging by a phenomenal cast and production team. So what makes this intense, thoughtful theatre piece, that takes place in a nameless Latin American country, “reminiscent of Chili,” so profoundly relevant and worth seeing?