Nilo Cruz in 5 Plays

Only the second Latine playwright ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (in 2003, for his play Anna in the Tropics), Nilo Cruz has created a warm, moving body of work that pays tribute to his Cuban heritage while also being accessible and inviting to all audiences. Cruz, whose work has been met with critical acclaim and public adoration throughout his career, is one of the leading Latine voices in modern theatre, and his collection of vibrant, lively plays continues to grow.

Cruz’s characters, whatever their emotional state at a given point in the work, always feel authentic and true to the circumstances of their creation. They shout, grieve, dream and live with vitality, a vitality that comes from Cruz’s powerful command of dialogue and facility with conjuring setting. To read his work is to be transported – so explore a collection of his most beloved plays below and travel across time and space, letting the particular rhythms of his language and work envelop you.

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Night Train to Bolina (1995) (US)

Cruz’s early work established his thematic fascination with the lives of relatively normal people caught up in the grand sweep of history. In this one-act drama, set in an unidentified country in Latin America in the eighties during a period of guerrilla warfare, two children threatened by starvation and abuse flee their rural village for “the city.” Dancing on a fine line between innocent fantasy and harsh reality, Mateo and Clara explore their imaginations in a world of dark mysticism and denied love.

The shorter runtime of the play did not change the emotional potency of the work. The San Jose Mercury News noted that Cruz, “draws their (Mateo and Clara’s) interwoven souls in language that’s simple and poetic without being pretentious,” while the Yale Daily News called it an “unconventional journey through deceptively familiar territory.” Cruz’s gift – to intermingle the fantastical and the real, the warm and the chilling with flair and fluidity – was already beginning to make itself known. Debuting at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, Night Train to Bolina remains a deft look at adolescence and the escapism that children often need to conjure for themselves.

Two Sisters and a Piano (1999) (US)

Set in 1991 during the Pan American Games in Havana while the Russians were pulling out of Cuba, Two Sisters and a Piano portrays two sisters, novelist Maria Celia and pianist Sofia, serving time under house arrest. Passion infiltrates politics when a lieutenant assigned to their case becomes infatuated with Maria Celia, whose literature he has been reading. Again, Cruz brought the political crashing into the personal to moving results. Despite their oppression, Maria Celia and Sofia’s spirits remain undaunted in a stirring testament to Cruz’s own heritage.

A success on its debut at the McCarter Theatre Centre in New Jersey, – where the Newark Star-Ledger called the play “one of the most fascinating cat-and-mouse games to be seen on the stage” – the play then moved off-Broadway, opening at the Public Theater in February 2000. A reminder that personal, human stories can also be deeply thrilling, Two Sisters and a Piano gives its female leads agency that extends beyond the bounds of their incarceration.

A Bicycle Country (1999) (US)

Julio, Ines and Pepe’s lives seem to be moving nowhere. So, they set out to build a dream, even if that dream seems perilous. In this stirring portrait of three Cuban exiles and their harrowing journey across the Caribbean Sea, Cruz examines the universal themes of freedom and oppression alongside hope and survival. Drawing inspiration from the natural world, the play is divided into sections entitled Tierra, Agua, Fuego and Aire (Earth, Water, Fire and Air) and gives opportunities for theatres to convey the magic of the elements through simple staging. Through it all, A Bicycle Country re-imagines the politics of re-migration with vivid clarity. Moving ever onward, Julio, Ines and Pepe become symbols of resistance and perseverance.

Premiering in Manalapan, Florida on December 10, 1999, A Bicycle Country spoke to resonant issues of Cuban and American politics yet approached them with poetic style and expansive emotional arcs. While Cruz’s work, both in this period and later on his career, touches on Latine narratives, they are inherently human stories: Stories of battling against everything, even the elements themselves, to try and achieve the dreams that lie in your heart.

Anna in the Tropics (2002) (US)

Cruz’s major breakthrough came with Anna in the Tropics, whose runaway success led to it being awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A stirring meditation on the power of art, this poignant and poetic play is set in Florida in 1929 in a Cuban-American cigar factory, where cigars are still rolled by hand and “lectors” are employed to educate and entertain the workers. The arrival of a new lector is a cause for celebration, but when he begins to read aloud from Anna Karenina, he unwittingly becomes a catalyst in the lives of his avid listeners, for whom Tolstoy, the tropics and the American Dream prove a volatile combination.

Both timeless-feeling and yet extremely redolent of its specific setting, the play was immediately met with critical praise. The Miami Herald stated, “[Cruz’s words] waft from a stage like a scented breeze. They sparkle and prickle and swirl, enveloping those who listen in both a specific place and time – and in timeless passions that touch us all.” In doing so, Cruz placed himself among the pantheon of artists whose art had the power to entrance and change lives. After opening in Florida with the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Anna in the Tropics then moved to the McCarter Theatre Center in New Jersey and then to Broadway, opening at the Royale Theatre (now the Bernard B. Jacobs) with a production starring Victor Argo, David Zayas, Priscilla Lopez and Vanessa Aspillaga.

In Anna in the Tropics, Cruz again captures the lives of workers caught up amidst the tides of history. These ordinary peoples’ lives are imbued with meaning, importance and emotional potency, and this stirring theatrical statement clearly resonated in the hearts of audiences. Nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play as well as its Pulitzer victory, the show lives long in the memory for those lucky enough to see it.

Our Town (Multilingual) (2017) (US)

Later on in his career, Cruz continued his elevation of American stories, this time by reworking and modernizing a classic of the theatre. Along with Jeff Augustin, Cruz brought Thornton Wilder’s elegiac Our Town into the 21st century. The play depicts the small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts: “Daily Life,” “Love and Marriage” and “Death and Eternity.” Narrated by a stage manager and performed with minimal props and sets, it remains one of the most moving examinations of the human existence from first steps to last rites. The multilingual version retains the human core at the heart of the play and infuses it with layers of culture and community. In doing so, Grover’s Corners becomes an international address as Spanish and Creole voices are added to the mix, voices as American as any other tongue.

The new multilingual version of Our Town debuted in November 2017 at the Colony Theatre in Miami, Florida, with Miami New Drama. While adapting a classic piece of theatre is always a challenging task, Cruz and his co-writers did so by honoring what has spoken to audiences for over eighty years while placing the text in a new context that celebrates the boundless diversity of the American future.

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Notably excluded from this list are the following plays:

• • Beauty of the Father (US)
  • Hortensia and The Museum of Dreams (US)
  • Cruz’s exemplary translations of classic Spanish-language playwrights: of Federico García Lorca’s Doña Rosita the Spinster (US) and Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s Life is a Dream (US)

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To explore Cruz’s work in even more depth, or to discover more stirring and expansive dramas, visit Concord Theatricals in the US or the UK.