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A Poetry of the Theater:
Nilo Cruz
Nilo Cruz was born in 1960 in Matanzas,
Cuba,
a city with a rich literary and artistic heritage.
In those early post-revolution days, Cubans were
emigrating in droves. Cruz says his parents, Nilo Sr.
and Tina, had at first been pro-revolution, but as the
movement grew more Marxist, “they thought it was
time to go.” When Cruz was a toddler, his father was
imprisoned for attempting to emigrate to the U.S.
Finally, in 1970, Cruz and his parents would make it to
Little Havana in Miami, Florida, on a Freedom Flight,
leaving behind his two older sisters who had to stay
because their husbands were of military age.
Cruz remembers Miami as being rife with racial tension.
The family worked at adjusting to life as exiles. Cruz’s
mother found a job in a factory, his father at a shoe
store. Cruz went to school, learned English, and began
writing poetry. When he was a teenager, his mother
told him, “You’re a writer,” and gave him a typewriter.
Theater, he says, “sort of fell in my lap.” He tagged
along with friends to a theater course at a community
college and started writing his own scenes to
perform in class. The professor suggested he might
be a playwright. Later, he met playwright Maria
Irene Fornés, who invited him to her Intar Hispanic
Playwrights Laboratory. “From then on,” he says, “my
life changed.” He got an MFA from Brown University
and became a member of New Dramatists in New
York.
In 2003, Cruz became the first Cuban-American
playwright to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Anna in the Tropics
is
set in a 1929 cigar factory in which a lector entertains
the workers by reading
Anna Karenina. Anna in the
Tropics,
says Cruz, “is about the power of art and
how art can actually change your life.” Many of
Cruz’s plays deal with the immigrant experience, the
struggles of those who are oppressed and displaced.
It was his play
Two Sisters and a Piano
, about siblings
living under house arrest in Cuba, that convinced
Jimmy López that Cruz was the librettist for
Bel Canto
:
“The whole play happens within the house from
beginning to end,” said López, “This is what made me
think Nilo might be the one.”
Cruz has built a reputation for writing that is lush and
poetic. John Williams of
American Theatre
magazine
called his plays “imagistic dramatic poems…rich in
myth, symbol, and metaphor.” Director Emily Mann,
who has staged several of his plays, says Cruz has “a
kind of poetry of the theater that Tennessee Williams
had, a language that spins a beautiful atmosphere.”
Cruz remembers his uncle reciting poems by Cuban
poet José Martí in the midst of a party. “Everybody
made it a point in the old days to learn songs,” he
says, “but more than anything to learn poetry. I
remember actually what got me started writing was
reading a poem by Emily Dickinson when I was ten
years old here in exile, and I remember reading that
poem and saying, ‘I want to do this. I want to write.’”
Poetry, Cruz says, has always been a part of his life:
“I think that you can find poetry everywhere…I see
words, I see language for the stage as music.”
Photo: Todd Rosenberg