Nilo Cruz

Playwright

• Born: 1960
• Place of Birth: Matanzas, Cuba

Contribution: Nilo Cruz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright best known for his 2002 play Anna and the Tropics. Cruz was the first Latin American writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Background

Nilo Cruz was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1960. As a child, he wrote poetry and performed plays with his cousins. When Cruz was two years old, his father decided that he wanted to leave Cuba but was caught trying to leave the country and was imprisoned for two years. The Cruz family received a permit to move to the United States six years after he was released. The family, including Cruz's parents and two sisters, settled in Miami, Florida. Cruz did not speak English when he arrived, though he learned quickly and spoke the language fluently within a year. As a teenager, he worked for his father's shoe store in the neighborhood of Little Havana and aspired to be an actor.

Cruz briefly attended college after graduating from high school but dropped out. Five years later, he enrolled at Miami Dade College, where a teacher encouraged him to pursue writing. He left his studies in 1988 to participate in a playwriting lab in New York City, headed by the legendary playwright María Irene Fornés. Fornés, who became Cruz's mentor, was also born in Cuba. She recommended him for the prestigious playwriting program at Brown University, then run by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel. He had not completed an undergraduate degree, yet Cruz was accepted at Brown, where he earned a master of fine arts in playwriting in 1994.

Career

Cruz received his first show in December 1994, when the Magic Theatre in San Francisco produced his play Night Train to Bolina, about two children in a war-torn Latin American country who decide to run away to a mythical place called Bolina. His next play, A Park in Our House—about a family living in 1970s Cuba—premiered at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, in June 1995. Dancing on Her Knees, a play that Cruz began in a forty-eight-hour playwriting challenge at Yale University, premiered in March 1996 at New York's Public Theater. Featuring dance and poetry, the work centers on a drag queen remembering her lover who died of AIDS.

Cruz's Two Sisters and a Piano premiered at the McCarter in February 1999. The play, which is set in 1990s Cuba, is about two Havana sisters under house arrest for speaking out against Fidel Castro. A Bicycle Country, about three Cuban exiles traveling to Miami, premiered in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1999.

Cruz's play Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, which was originally commissioned by the Latino Theatre Initiative at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, premiered at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, in September 2001. The play, about the adult lives of two Cuban children sent to America in the early 1960s and separated from their mother, was praised by critics and audiences alike.

For his 2002 work Anna and the Tropics (commissioned by the New Theatre), Cruz drew inspiration from the Cuban tradition of cigar rolling—something he had first learned of from his father. In the 1920s, Tampa-area cigar factories would hire lectors to read to factory workers as they rolled cigars. Lectors read everything from newspapers to great works of literature. In Anna and the Tropics, the lector reads Leo Tolstoy's epic love story, Anna Karenina (1887). The action of the novel serves as the catalyst for the events of the play.

In 2003, Cruz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Anna and the Tropics. Several aspects of his victory were unusual. Not one person from the Pulitzer nominating committee or the ruling board ever saw the play performed—it was selected solely because of the script. Anna and the Tropics was only the second play in Pulitzer history to be honored without first appearing in New York, and Cruz was the first Latin American in history to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Following a run at the McCarter Theater, Anna and the Tropics opened at the Royale Theatre on Broadway in November 2003. The production starred Daphne Rubin-Vega, who played the character Mimi in the workshop version of the musical Rent, and Jimmy Smits of the television show NYPD Blue (1993–2005).

Cruz's experimental play Lorca in a Green Dress, about the life and death of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in July 2003. In addition to producing material based on Lorca's life, Cruz later translated Lorca's plays The House of Bernarda Alba (2005) and Doña Rosita the Spinster (2009). Cruz's play, Beauty of the Father, premiered at the New Theatre in January 2004. The play is about a Spanish father and daughter who fall in love with the same man. Cruz's The Color of Desire, which premiered at Coral Gable's Actor's Theatre in October 2010, centers on the relationship between an American businessman and a Cuban actress whom he convinces to impersonate his dead lover. The play was commissioned by Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Hurricane, about a family whose lives are destroyed by a storm on a Caribbean island, also premiered in October 2010 at the Ringling International Arts Festival in Sarasota, Florida.

Cruz's play Bathing in the Moonlight premiered in 2016. It focuses on a woman struggling with the twenty-first century housing crisis and also explores many Roman Catholic themes through the main character's relationship with a priest. He followed with Exquisita Agonia (Exquisite Agony, 2018), which appeared off-Broadway at the Repertorio Español. That play tells the story of an opera singer who tracks down the young man who received her husband's heart in a transplant. In October 2019, Cruz was named a distinguished playwright-in-residence at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television for the 2019-20 academic year.

Cruz debuted a new play, Sed En La Calle del Agua (Thirst on Water Street), in 2024. Set primarily in a mental asylum in 1929, the play follows a patient and painter who falls into a deep depression after the death of her infant daughter. During the same year, he was the recipient of the George Abbott Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts.

Impact

Cruz became one of the most respected playwrights of his day, as reflected in his success in earning the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and other awards. While he has sometimes been criticized for overwriting and overusing metaphors, his visceral, image-based plays continue to connect with audiences across the globe. In an industry where playwrights vie for just a second production of a play, Cruz rose to enjoy a steady stream of productions annually. Still, his global appeal has not undercut his community roots. Cruz formed a particular fan base in the Coral Gables community, home to the New Theatre and the Actor's Playhouse, where a large part of the audience personally connects to the Cuban American experience.

Personal Life

Cruz divides his time between New York City, where he has lived since 1991, and Miami. He has taught playwriting at Brown, Yale, the University of Iowa, and the University of Miami, Florida.

Bibliography

DiMattei, Christine. "New Play By Pulitzer Winner Nilo Cruz Makes World Premiere in Miami." WLRN, 14 Mar. 2024, www.wlrn.org/arts-culture/2024-03-14/play-nilo-cruz-sed-en-la-calle-del-agua-premiere-miami. Accessed 17 Sept. 2024.

Dominguez, Robert. "An Unknown Playwright Gets A Big Boost." Daily News. Daily News, 19 Apr. 2003. Web. 29 July 2013.

Herbst, Diane. "Cruz To The Top." New York Post. News Corp., 25. Sept. 2012. Web. 29 July 2013.

Hirschman, Bill. "Review: 'The Color of Desire.'" Variety. Variety Media, 10 Oct. 2010. Web. 21 July 2013.

Horwitz, Simi. "Face to Face: Nilo Cruz—When Doors Start Opening." Backstage. Backstage, 18 Dec. 2003. Web. 20 July 2013.

Kuchwara, Michael. "The Unveiling of 'Anna' Focuses Attention on Cuban-born Playwright Nilo Cruz." Tuscaloosa News. Halifax Media Group, 21 Sept. 2003. Web. 29 July 2013.

Persaud, Babita. "Playwright Finds the Heritage Is the Thing." St. Petersburg Times. Times, 20 Apr. 2003. Web. 20 July 2013.