 | Nilo Cruz |
One of the assets of teaching playwriting at Yale, Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz observes, is taking the train between his home in Manhattan and New Haven.
The rhythm of the train speeding along its tracks and the very state of being suspended in motion are both conducive to the sort of work he does, explains Cruz, who sees train travel as the perfect metaphor for that work. "It's that time between here and there -- in between places. That's what playwriting is about," he says.
Being suspended between places, languages and cultures also describes a great deal of Cruz's life. A native of Cuba, Cruz came to the United States at the age of nine. Although he is fluent in both languages, English dominated as his language of literacy, while Spanish was the spoken vernacular.
"I think in Spanish but I write in English," he explains. While he used to consider the linguistic legacy of his childhood a handicap, he later came to embrace it as a gift to his craft. "It makes me question language," he says.
The phenomenon brings a freshness to the language he writes for the stage, he claims, and lends his plays a certain vitality that he considers essential for his art. He notes, too, that his native language, Spanish, imparts a distinct rhythm and cadence to the English words he writes.
This intertwining of languages is a theme he explores in "Anna in the Tropics," the play for which he won the Pulitzer (see story). The play takes place in a Cuban-American town in 1929 and concerns a practice that was common in Cuban factories -- namely, having a "lector" read to workers while they toiled, in this case, as women roll cigars by hand. The tradition, which has died entirely in the United States, persists in Cuba, Cruz says, but only in cigar factories because the human voice can't compete with the noise made by most machinery.
Some of the workers at the time were illiterate, Cruz notes, but they could quote Shakespeare or Tolstoy or some of the classic Spanish writers. He likens the phenomenon to musicians who can't read music but can play it.
Cruz admits to a preference for the spoken word -- which, he says, is the reason he writes plays rather than novels.
One week after Cruz became the first Latino ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama he talked about how his life has changed in that short time and how it has not.
The first thing he noticed after he got the news that his play had won the Pulitzer -- soon after it had also garnered the prestigious Harold and Mimi Steinberg award -- was that he was suddenly in high demand. "I got a barrage of phone calls," he recalls. These included 8 or 10 from Hollywood and several from theaters that had previously rejected his work.
Cruz, however, was most gratified by the response of his friends and neighbors. "The most beautiful things are the simple things that have come with this award," he notes.
The morning after the announcement, he said, the man at the neighborhood newspaper stand greeted him ecstatically. "Do you want newspapers? I'll give you all the newspapers that you want for free." The reception was no less effusive at the corner diner in his neighborhood in Manhattan, where the other regular customers -- who previously weren't aware he was a writer -- " insisted on buying me lunch," Cruz beamed.
"It really means so much for other people. It isn't just a name. They place a face. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winner made out of flesh and bones-- not just someone abstract that they read about in the newspaper."
Cruz takes special pleasure in the calls from the many Latinos who have expressed their shared pride for his achievement. "I think it has done a lot for the Hispanic community," he says. "I think that from now on the work of Latino writers will be more embraced than it has been in the past," he predicts.
Cruz doesn't worry that his sudden celebrity and success will change his life. "I'm a very disciplined writer," he reports. On the day he won the Pulitzer and the day after, Cruz did what he does every day of his life: He wrote.
A writer who loves movies, Cruz thinks "Anna of the Tropics" is particularly cinematic and hopes to see it as a film some day. The play, which was commissioned by the New Theater in Coral Gables, Florida, will open at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, in September. Another play by Cruz, "Lorca in a Green Dress," about the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, will have its first performance this summer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
-- By Dorie Baker
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