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Catching
up with Cruz 3r4f1j
Network to spotlight Cuban culture
in English
Riding the wave of his Pulitzer Prize,
Miamian Nilo Cruz is enjoying the road show
By Christine Dolen, [emailprotected].
Posted on Sun, Oct. 26, 2003 in The
Miami Herald.
Grand emotions, savored history and life-changing
art swirl through Nilo Cruz's tender, imioned
writing. And since April, those things have
also enveloped his life like the sinuous
smoke from an aromatic Cuban cigar.
It has been an extraordinary year of firsts
for Cruz, the Cuban-born, Miami-raised playwright
whose Anna in the Tropics secured him a
place in history as the first Latino awarded
the Pulitzer Prize for drama -- and plunged
him into a joyous, distracting professional
whirlwind from which he has yet to slow
down.
Just in the past month, Cruz says from
his apartment on Manhattan's East Side,
''I was at the McCarter Theatre [in Princeton,
N.J.] for rehearsals and the play's opening
there. I made a speech at the Labor Department
in Washington. I visited the Victory Gardens
Theater in Chicago twice before Anna opened
there, and went to California once to see
Anna at South Coast Rep. I just got back
from London, where I saw Two Sisters and
a Piano, and now I'm going to Puerto Rico
for a conference. And I'll be in South Florida
for the Carbonell Awards,'' where he and
Coral Gables' New Theatre, which commissioned
and premiered Anna in the Tropics, will
get a special award for it during Nov. 10
ceremonies at the Broward Center.
Then comes Broadway, another first.
Cruz's whirlwind began just two days before
the Pulitzer was announced April 7, when
he became the first Latino playwright to
win the ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award, with
its $15,000 first-place prize.
Then the Pulitzer brought another first:
Though one other play, The Kentucky Cycle,
won the Pulitzer before being produced in
New York, those who chose it saw its debut
production in Seattle. This time, no one
on either the drama jury or the full Pulitzer
board had seen the sole production of Anna
in the Tropics during its 23-performance
world premiere run at New Theatre in October-November
2002. Like the lector, or reader, in Cruz's
lush play about end-of-an-era cigar-makers
in Ybor City, they had only read Anna in
the Tropics, only imagined a world spun
from the playwright's imagination, research,
artistry and luxuriantly evocative imagery.
Precisely three weeks from today at Manhattan's
Royale Theatre, Cruz will add another first
to his wondrous collection: Anna in the
Tropics becomes the first drama with an
all-Latino cast by a Latino playwright to
open on Broadway.
''If winning this award can do anything,
perhaps it will be a permission to embrace
this kind of work,'' says Cruz, 43, who
has seen three separate productions of Anna
open over the past month. "Now the
play has been blessed. The theater is full
every night. People want to celebrate the
award.''
STAGE POET
Though it's highly unusual for a Broadway-bound,
Pulitzer-winning play to appear at a trio
of major regional theaters right before
its New York opening -- and for all three
to get glowing reviews -- it's just one
more facet of the Cruz/Anna anomaly. Before
April and the Pulitzer, each of the three
had committed to its production based on
the script, which Cruz continued to hone
even after it won the prize.
At the McCarter, where Cruz's plays A Park
in Our House and Two Sisters and a Piano
were commissioned and had their world premieres,
he already had an irer and colleague
in artistic director Emily Mann, herself
a playwright.
She chose Anna in the Tropics to inaugurate
the McCarter's Roger S. Berlind Theatre
in September, she says, because it had "the
smell of a classic play. It was set at the
end of an era, in 1929, at the end of prosperity
and of an industry. It was a whole lost
world. In that way, it was reminiscent of
Chekhov.''
As distinctive as Cruz's artistic voice
is, theater people hear in it the echoes
and perceive the influences of others: the
magic realism of Gabriel Garca Mrquez;
the dramatic poetry of Tennessee Williams;
the ion of Federico Garca Lorca.
''I've always loved Nilo's stage poetry.
There's no one else alive who has it. It's
Tennessee reincarnated in a lot of ways,
but with his own unique voice,'' says Mann,
whose much-praised McCarter production will
now face another test as it moves on to
Broadway. Its high-profile ensemble cast
includes NYPD Blue veteran Jimmy Smits,
making his Broadway debut; Daphne Rubin-Vega,
who originated the role of Mimi in Rent;
and Tony Award-winner Priscilla Lopez, who
says, "I'm thrilled and honored and
to happy to be part of this. It's so important.''
Smits, who plays the catalytic lector in
Anna, traveled to Chicago and California
on his week between the end of the McCarter
run and the start of Broadway rehearsals,
to see the other productions and to
Cruz.
''I feel honored and privileged to give
life to the character in this play,'' says
Smits, who mixes playfulness and sensuality
as he reads ages from Anna Karenina
to Cruz's fictional cigar-makers. "Here
you have a play that says something about
art and literature. And then you have the
whole family drama. I'm always looking for
that piece that's not just wearing our culture
on our sleeve. . . . It's an insightful
[look] into a culture.''
Mann acknowledges, "I feel a great
responsibility. This is a brilliant new
American play. If it's done correctly, people
will recognize that.''
CALM AMID STORM
The stakes, of course, are the highest
in America's commercial theater. Will the
New York and national critics embrace Anna
in the Tropics or, as they did with The
Kentucky Cycle, pounce on Cruz's prize-winning
''mystery'' play? Will it start off strong,
as Pulitzer winner August Wilson's operatically
scaled plays do, only to have audiences
dwindle or opt for the sheer escapism of
Little Shop of Horrors or Hugh Jackman in
The Boy From Oz? Will Cruz add the Tony
Award to his growing collection of honors?
Talk to Cruz, a man who meditates and calmly
considers everything, and you become convinced
that if anyone can stay relatively sane
and the same through this wild ride, he
can.
''I was in a state of shock at the beginning,''
Cruz recalls over dinner near New York's
Public Theatre, one of several companies
that can count itself among his artistic
homes. "With the Pulitzer came so many
things. Not just the recognition, but all
the other things its brings. . . . It has
made my life very public.''
The offers -- for turning his work into
movies, for being a featured speaker --
have come pouring in, along with enough
money that he has started thinking about
getting a part-time place in South Florida,
somewhere near the ocean, in part so he
can work with theater students in the place
where he got started.
But he has learned to guard his time and
to say no. Post-Pulitzer, he has stayed
focused on seeing another new script, Lorca
in a Green Dress, to fruition as it premiered
over the summer at the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival; on getting Anna in the Tropics
just right; on listening to readings of
Beauty of the Father, his newest work, which
will have its world premiere at New Theatre
in January. After Anna opens, he'll turn
to rewrites of Beauty of the Father, a ionate
contemporary play about a sculptor, his
estranged daughter and the young man who
captivates them both.
''I don't want to become a commodity. I'm
an artist,'' says Cruz, who lived for several
years in a converted sound booth at New
Dramatists, a nonprofit New York theater
playwrights' development group, while trying
to make it. "That's the choice I made.
Not to make a lot of money.''
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater
critic.
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