Child’s bike ride turns into momentous coming-of-age journey in Walnut Creek show

Zooming along on a bicycle, an 11-year-old kid contemplates a hometown in decline and veers between exhilaration and terror. That’s just the barest bones of “Red Bike,” the enthrallingly poetic play by Caridad Svich that Center Repertory Company is staging at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts.

“There’s this kid, and they have a bike that they love,” says Svich, an Obie Award-winning Cuban American playwright and translator recently named artistic director of New Play Development at New York’s Lucille Lortel Theatre.

“One day they go on a ride up the hill, and on that ride, which maybe takes them a little bit farther out than they usually go, they start thinking about everything in their life and their town and their family,” she adds “And they have a huge accident that coincides with being chased by a real estate developer that to them becomes a monster in some sort of nightmare scenario. It’s very much a hero’s journey, which is unlike a lot of my plays. You wrestle with a monster, and then you figure out who have you become, and who are you going to be. It’s a play about becoming, and in that sense it’s very much a coming-of-age piece.”

“Red Bike” premiered in 2018 at Salt Lake City’s Pygmalion Productions in a four-city National New Play Network rolling world premiere. Originally written as a solo piece, it’s often been performed by two or more performers switching off within the poetic internal monologue of the child narrator.

Directed by Jeffrey Lo, Center Rep’s production is performed by two actors: Adrienne Kaori Walters and Amy Lizardo.

“Choreographically, you can do more things,” Svich says of the two-person cast. “But it also does some cool things around sharing of identity, which is something I’m always interested in as a writer. Then the actors are sort of playing the different sides of that person. I like that from a conceptual angle and also from a political one, in the sense that different bodies and different lived experiences could inhabit this kid.”

Svich says the work started in part from a desire to write a play from the perspective of a child.

“There was a kind of lightness that I wanted to capture in that voice that I thought would be fun and playful and direct,” she says. “I was thinking a lot about what lessons young people are learning growing up in pretty fraught times, and especially young people that are living in places that have felt abandoned economically by the government.”

“Red Bike” soon became the first in a seven-play cycle of thematically connected plays that Svich wrote.

“I wrote ‘Red Bike,’ and then I wrote a play called ‘Life Jacket,’ which coincidentally is going to premiere in Maryland around the same time that ‘Red Bike’ is happening at Center Rep. And then I realized that I was writing more plays, that this was a big adventure that I was on as a writer.”