Nilo Cruz received a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University.
Career
Gallery of Nilo Cruz
2014
5555 N Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, FL 34243, United States
Nilo Cruz talks about his creative process during a talk sponsored by the Greenfield Prize in the Cook Theatre at the FSU Center for the Performing Arts.
5555 N Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, FL 34243, United States
Nilo Cruz talks about his creative process during a talk sponsored by the Greenfield Prize in the Cook Theatre at the FSU Center for the Performing Arts.
(This lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers...)
This lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Nilo Cruz imagines the catalytic effect the arrival of a new "lector" has on a Cuban-American family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land.
(After a young woman reunites with her father painter in t...)
After a young woman reunites with her father painter in the south of Spain, both fall in love with the same exciting young man. Beauty of the Father invokes the lyrical language of Lorca, as the great poet himself appears to the father and counsels him in his life. The play's rhythms are infused with the spirit of the Andalusian people who sing their sorrows in cante jondo, as Cruz once again creates musical poetry to honor unrequited love.
(The Miami Herald Ariel Strauss, a Jewish Cuban man, striv...)
The Miami Herald Ariel Strauss, a Jewish Cuban man, strives to explore his cultural history when he encounters Bemadette Kahn, an older woman and famed novelist who seeks to relive hers. Cruz's passionate romantic drama takes place in a dreamscape, somewhere between history and memory, present and past. Sotto Voce is a work of dramatic poetry and imaginative exploration of nostalgia and the ensuing heartbreak it comes with.
Nilo Cruz is a Cuban-United States playwright and educator, who is best known for his play Anna in the Tropics. He has taught in several educational institutions. His plays have Latino themes.
Background
Nilo Cruz was born in 1960, in Matanzas, Cuba. He is a son of Nilo Cruz, a shoe salesman, and Tina Cruz. A staunch opponent of the new communist government, Cruz's father was incarcerated in 1962 for opposing the increased militarization that resulted from Cuba's ties with the Soviet Union. Cruz's parents remained steadfast in their opposition to the Castro regime, withholding their son from the highly-organized government-sponsored system of physical education classes by inducing a physician friend to declare that Nilo had contracted hepatitis. To perpetuate the lie, Nilo could not play outdoors with his friends as he had previously done. In 1970, the family took a Freedom Flight to Miami, settling in Little Havana. Nilo Cruz has returned just once since then, to visit his sisters in 1979.
Education
Cruz was first inspired to write when he discovered Emily Dickinson's poems in sixth grade. He received a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University in 1994.
Cruz became interested in theater in the early 1980s as an actor, and in 1988 he directed Mud, by playwright Maria Irene Fomes, who in 1990 became the only other Latin American ever nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for drama. Fornes invited Cruz to join her Intar Hispanic Playwrights Laboratory, and it was there that he began writing plays in earnest. Cruz's plays were soon produced in theaters across the country, from San Francisco to Princeton. Several of his works have been staged by the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York.
Nilo Cruz is a part of the Playwrights Ensemble at Victory Gardens in Chicago and has taught playwriting at Brown, New York University Gallatin School, Yale School of Drama, and the University of Iowa. He worked as a playwright-in-residence at McCarter Theatre in 2000.
In 2001, Cruz served as the playwright-in-residence for the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, which commissioned his play Anna in the Tropics.
In 2002, Cruz adapted Colombian author Gabriel García Marquez's short story "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" as a musical that premiered at the Children's Theatre in Minneapolis. He also wrote his most famous work, Anna in the Tropics, that year.
One of Cruz's first plays to be produced, the semiautobiographical A Park in Our House, harkens back to the playwright's youth in Cuba, when Fidel Castro rolled out his "Ten Million Tons of Sugar Harvest" program in 1970.
The play Two Sisters and a Piano, though not autobiographical, features characters based on Cruz's sisters as well as on the Cuban poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela, who was imprisoned by Castro for her writings.
Though he was but nine when he arrived in the United States, Cuba remains central in his writings. With narratives and dialogue rich in linguistic rhythm, magical realism, and a unique feminist view, the playwright’s voice has been described as "luscious," "sensual," "evocative," and "dreamlike."
Nilo Cruz is also the author of the plays Night Train to Bolina, produced in San Francisco, CA, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, and Graffiti. He translated Federico García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba and Dona Rosita, the Spinster. He wrote the libretto for Bel Canto, an opera based on the eponymous Ann Patchett novel.
Nilo Cruz became the first Latin American ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and without having a major presence on the New York theater scene. In fact, none of the Pulitzer judges had seen a performance of Anna in the Tropics; it won on the strength of its script alone. In addition to his Pulitzer, he has been the recipient of two NEA/TCG National Theatre Artist Residency grants, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and many other awards. Through his work, Cruz has become one of the most revered playwrights of our time. His introduction of Latino themed plays into mainstream American theater has set the stage for playwrights and authors to come. Cruz was awarded the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Whittier College in 2010.
Nilo Cruz doesn't aim to speak for the community as a whole, nor is he trying to advocate for political change in his homeland. His plays are about being an individual. He thinks, that belonging to a particular group, left or right, entails a political loss. "When you embrace your whole being and all that you can be in this world, that's the strongest position," - he said.
Views
Nilo Cruz admits to a preference for the spoken word, which is the reason he writes plays rather than novels.
Quotations:
"Just because we're part of the modern world doesn't mean that we can't find the poetic in the modern world. More than anything, I am interested in beauty. I think with beauty comes poetry, comes the lyrical. I think beauty is concerned with justice. When one reads a play like Antigone, one identifies with the main character because Antigone is searching for justice. I think there's beauty in that quest, and there's lyricism to be found not only with the words that are chosen but with the situation."
Membership
New Dramatists
,
United States
Interests
Writers
Federico Garcia Lorca, Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, William Shakespeare
Connections
Nilo Cruz is divorced; he has a daughter named Chloe Garcia-Cruz.
