AMERICAN THEATRE
(Vol. 20, No. 7)
Sept. 2003, pp. 22+

Copyright © Theatre Communications Group, Inc. September 2003. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Dreamer from Cuba

By Randy Gener

• For Pulitzer-winner Nilo Cruz, exile is a window into hothouse landscapes of the imagination

     

Nilo Cruz, Playwright Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz in 2003.

Since taking the freedom flight to Miami in 1970 at the tender age of 9, Nilo Cruz has set foot in Fidel Castro's Cuba only once. It was 1979, and he was 19. At the time, the Cuban government allowed families to visit their relatives, so Cruz and his parents spent two weeks with his two older sisters, who had remained there. Now that his sisters live in the United States, he rarely imagines going back.

     "I haven't tried," Cruz says. "It hasn't been the right time. I don't have any immediate relatives left in the country. Sometimes I have the desire to witness what life is like there. Sometimes I don't."

     Unlike many from the generation that went into exile at the beginning of the revolution, the 42-year-old Cruz has no plans to permanently return to the country of his birth. His heart is not dispossessed; it does not ache for all that he has lost or obsessively dwell on what he left behind. He is not afflicted with the disease that creeps through an exile's mind and eats it away with torment, sentimentality and painful longings; neither is he the morose type who dreams of being buried there in old age. "I don't feel like I am bound by the place where I was born," Cruz remarks. "Cuba has changed tremendously. I have changed, too. I guess sometimes I fear what the impact of going back would be on me."

     But exile is not only about alienation. People in exile, as the twice-exiled Cuban poet Octavio Armand once observed, "always carry along their homes: the language, customs, traditions of their countries. They transpose and translate: they live between two shores. Their homes and landscapes live within them, although they are no longer places of physical dwelling."

     Seen in this light, the lack of a pressing need to return to Cuba is, for Nilo Cruz (pronounced knee-low), a reflection of how, in a profound and spiritual way, he has always kept strong ties to the island--and how through his writing practice, he has never forsaken it. In play after play, Cruz paints a portrait of cubania--of Cubanness--as a window out of the four walls of estrangement. His theatre is a form of escape, a flight from separation, displacement and cultural fragmentation.

     In his plays, Cruz almost always journeys back to Cuba, even when the play is not set there. Cruz, who was raised in Miami and now lives in Manhattan, is no less Cuban for keeping a geographic distance between himself and the tropical island of his childhood. In Dancing on Her Knees, A Park in Our House, Two Sisters and a Piano, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams and now the Pulitzer-winning Anna in the Tropics, Cruz reconnects with the richness of his culture and the paradoxes of his identity. His artistic creations give voice to the stories, struggles and sensibilities of Cubans with nuance, great sensitivity and a hothouse theatricality.

     And he writes about Cuba like a dream. His words burn with the heat of visceral imagery and lyrical emotion. His plays, even the most naturalistic ones, have something of a well-made quality to them, but they bleed into something else; they seep with magic and mysticism. Like Federico Garcia Lorca and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cruz fills his writing with symbols and metaphors, allusions to literature and references to nature--the fragrance of guavas, the wet air of the bay, the sweetness of jasmine flowers, the veins coursing through a man's arms "like a Roman aqueduct."

     Cruz is a sensualist, a conjurer of mysterious voyages and luxuriant landscapes. He is a poetic chronicler, a documentarian of the presence of Latin people in American life. He conveys, most of all, the strength and persistence of the Cuban spirit through a wholly dramatic imagination.

     "It's not that it was an obligation," Cruz says. "It was where my heart was. If I don't embrace the richness of my culture, what are my options? To write about potatoes? To whitewash my characters? Just think of the fruits in the Caribbean; you have to get messy when eating a mango. But you don't get messy if you eat an apple. You are what you eat, and the environment has an effect on us. I have to embrace that in my work. That's the way I look at the group of people I am writing about. They're colorful, the way that I am. I am an exotic creature."

     It was the very exoticism of Anna in the Tropics that recommended it for a 2003 Pulitzer citation. The thick foliage of Cruz's language, surrounding the chewy bark of the play's historical subject matter, made Anna catnip to this year's panel of North American critics, none of whom had ever seen a production of the play but had only read its text. (This was the second time a Pulitzer has gone to a play that had not been staged in New York City, the first time being Robert Schenkkan's The Kentucky Cycle in 1992.)

     Commissioned by the New Theatre of Coral Gables, Fla., and written with the assistance of a National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group grant, Anna in the Tropics is now seen as the high-profile play that will propel Cruz into the mainstream consciousness. Theatregoers will no doubt "catch on" to his work from now on. The irony of this skewed view, of course, is that Cruz has been one of the most frequently produced contemporary playwrights in the U.S.--and one of the least self-imitative.

     Anna already had a life prescribed for it long before it was garlanded with awards. It is scheduled to kick off the fall season at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, starting Sept. 12, under the aegis of director Henry Godinez; and at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., starting Sept. 28, with Juliette Carillo at the helm. But the first and perhaps most visible new production begins Sept. 9 at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, N.J., where Anna inaugurates the new Roger S. Berlind Theatre. Staged by McCarter artistic director Emily Mann, this production stars Jimmy Smits, Vanessa Aspillaga, Priscilla Lopez, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega and David Zayas. According to rumors in the Rialto, the McCarter's Anna is angling for commercial berth in New York sometime in the late fall or early winter. If this happens, Broadway would seem almost to be a destiny foretold--an inevitability, if not an afterthought.

     In the meantime, Cruz has moved on to other projects. He is in the midst of a creative period under the bewitching spell of Federico Garcia Lorca, whose plays Dona Rosita the Spinster and The House of Bernarda Alba he has translated from the original Spanish. (He also adapted Garcia Marquez's A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings for Minneapolis's Children's Theatre Company.) Cruz's ritualistic drama Lorca in a Green Dress, which runs through Nov. 2 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is a surreal rumination (with at least six Lorca phantasms) on the wartime death of the Spanish poet and dramatist who was killed in 1936 by Franco's Nationalist forces near Granada. Lorca reappears, this time as a ghost, in the South Coast Rep commission Beauty of the Father, which will make its world premiere in January '04 at the intimate New Theatre in Coral Gables, where Anna was first staged in October '02.

     Beauty of the Father, to be directed by New Theatre's artistic leader Rafael de Acha, is Cruz's most contemporary work to date. Set in 1998 on the Mediterranean beaches of Spain's Costa del Sol, the play enacts the reunion between a young woman, Marina, whose mother has just died, and her gay father, Emiliano, a sculptor who had abandoned her. Karim, a handsome Moroccan boy, comes between them, having stolen both their hearts. Standing among the paintings and sculptures in Emiliano's villa is the presiding spirit of Lorca dressed in a white suit; he is advising Emiliano on how to fight his inner demons and beat back the unhappiness in his life. There is also an unfinished statue of Lorca, whose work-in-progress state is perhaps a harbinger of the uneasy efforts of the father and daughter to repair their estranged relationship.

     "Lorca was an exile in New York, and I find that artists are like exiles in the world," Cruz says. "We are looking at the world from the outside in order to write about it, to reflect on it. Sometimes audiences are not ready to see the world the way we see it. Yet we show them a mirror."

     In its portrayal of the spiritual force of literature and art, Anna in the Tropics holds up a semihistorical mirror to the lost world of Cuban tabaquerias (cigar factories). Set in 1929 in what is today a section of Tampa, Fla., Anna's story probes into the loves and lives of a family of cigar workers in the Spanish-Cuban community of Ybor City. Once upon a time, Ybor City, the "Cigar Capital of the World," was a busy manufacturing center of hand-rolled cigars--until several factors converged in the 1930s to bring about hard times. A major depression struck the nation, cigarette consumption grew, and improved machinery for rolling cigars began to produce a product comparable in workmanship to the hand-rolled variety.

     Cruz's luscious Anna, which traces Ybor City's decline, also revivifies the old tradition of lectores. In those days, factory workers, who were largely illiterate, contributed about 25 cents per week for the services of lectores (readers), men who sat on a platform and in a clear voice read aloud from novels and newspapers while the tabaqueros worked, rolling and cutting cigars. The workers treasured the right to select the reading materials, and so lectores might read from the classic works of Calderon, Lope De Vega, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Lorca. These talented lectores were also a voice for Cuban workers. After 1900, much of what was being read consisted of socialist, anarchist and communist literature mixed with local news and popular novels; because of its proximity, Ybor City was a critical area of congregation for those who pushed for Cuban sovereignty from Spain.

     Infused with language that is full of poetic feeling and mythic dimension, Anna dramatizes the catalytic effect of a new lector who arrives by boat from Cuba. Cruz scoured the University of Miami archives to research the play, which originally bore the working title Ybor City. "Jose Marti [the poet and national hero, dubbed 'the George Washington of Cuba'] lived in New York and read at factories in Tampa. He organized a whole brigade of cigar-rollers who went back to Cuba to fight for its independence. At first, I was going to write more about that, but it would've become more of a historical play."

     The thematic focus shifted, however, when Cruz pushed away the overwhelming research he had done and, as is typical of his writing process, followed his intuition instead. In Anna in the Tropics, Juan Julian, the new lector who comes to town and shakes things up, decides to read Leo Tolstoy's 19th-century novel of adultery, Anna Karenina, the Anna of the play's title. This choice proved pivotal. "I usually don't know the structure of the play, but once I discovered the book that was being read to the workers, that was when the writing of the play took off," Cruz recalls. "I am very respectful of books, but when I started to read Anna Karenina through the eyes of the characters in the play, I found myself writing in the margins of the pages. I was reacting to passages in the novel. The writing was coming so fast. And the story of Anna Karenina becomes the catalyst that changes the lives of the cigar workers."

     Anna in the Tropics thus evolved into an affirmation of the power of art--how art can alter the murmurs of the heart. "It's like that old saying: I read this book, and it changed the way I see the world, or I saw this movie, and it changed my life," says Cruz. "For me, that theme is also political."

     Does he want people to read the Tolstoy book? "Yes, certainly, but that was not my initial intention," Cruz replies. "There have been books that have done that to me--Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Jorge Borges. When I was writing Anna, I just loved the notion of illiterate cigar-rollers quoting Don Quixote and Shakespeare by heart. This play is about the need for culture, the need for literature. Art should be dangerous."

     Besides giving his dramatic imagination free rein, Anna Karenina spurred him to concoct, in one of the play's felicitous moments, his own cigar brand. "I remember being fascinated by cigar boxes and the art or aesthetic behind those boxes," he recalls. "They're very romantic and quite elaborate. A lot of the cigar labels are named after romantic love stories, like Romeo y Julieta or El Dante. You can still buy these cigars from Havana today. But there was never a cigar label called Anna Karenina, at least not that I know of. Because of Anna Karenina being at the center of the play, I find that there is no one main character in this particular script. If we really had to search for a main character, it would be Tolstoy's book."

     It was purely on the basis of the script of Anna that Cruz became the first Latin American dramatist to win the Pulitzer Prize. For him, it almost seemed one of those impossible episodes that would be credible if it had occurred in a magic-realist fiction. "They [the jurors] listened to the script," says Cruz, erupting into a smile. "They didn't see the play, which is great. They read it, and they listened to the words--this is what Anna is all about."

     People in exile are living documents, their very language is a document. Thus the obsession, which grips some as if they were notaries, with fixing an image, a moment.--Octavio Armand

     Nilo Cruz was born in Matanzas, Cuba, a year after the revolution began, and from the time of his earliest memories, his parents had always wanted out. His father, a shoe salesman, was outspoken about his dissatisfaction with Castro's government and his opposition to the country's militarization. In 1962 he was incarcerated for two years as a political prisoner, leaving Nilo with his grandmother, two sisters and a mother who had to work as a seamstress. He was two years old at the time.

     "We weren't rich," Cruz recalls. "Militiamen would come to our house sometimes at night, and they would try to get my father to go out in the field to cut sugar cane. He explained to them that he had developed a disability, back problems, while in prison, but the militiamen thought he was lying. My father was caught [on shipboard] the first time he tried to leave the country on his own. He was going to pave the way for us in the U.S., because you need someone here to claim you."

     His parents held the communist system in contempt. They frequently bought meat from the black market to put on the dinner table. In order to exempt Nilo from regimented physical education classes, his mother asked a doctor friend of the family to diagnose the boy with hepatitis. "That influenced my life as a child, because I was not able to play outside in my neighborhood as I had done before," he says.

     While his parents waited for their immigration papers to be approved, Nilo's childhood came to an end. "I lived a double life in Cuba," he recalls. "I was taught to lie at a young age. We had to pretend that we lived in a communist household. When my parents were in the last stage of making plans to leave for Miami, I had to pretend that we still believed in the system. I would hear my parents talking about how they got their passports together, but I could not talk about it to other friends or in school. I remember being caught up in a dual reality."

     Tina, Nilo's mother, several years previously, had tucked away a pair of traveling shoes for her son; she had purchased shoes that were two sizes bigger than he'd needed, in anticipation of their exodus. But, by the time Nilo left Cuba, he had already outgrown them. "I remember my first experience in the airport," he says. "I tell you, we had to wait for hours, and I started to get blisters on my feet. So I came to the U.S. very much barefoot. After we landed in Miami, my parents immediately took me to a shoe store. There's a whole scene about shoes in my play Two Sisters and a Piano."

     Cruz's sense of confusion continued on the bicultural shores of Miami, where he was told to lie again: He was to claim that his family was Baptist, not Catholic, because someone led his parents to believe that doing so would reap them "more benefits." "Of course, it didn't work," says the playwright, adding that his life as a boy was even more sheltered in the U.S. "There were racial riots going on in Miami, and my parents were terrified of letting me go out in the streets to play with friends. Then, of course, there was the problem of learning a new language."

     Cruz wrote his 1994 play A Park in Our House as a way of coming to emotional terms with the uprooting of his family. It began at McCarter Theatre as a one-act about a woman (not unlike his mother) who illegally buys a pig from the black market. The full-length version of Park unfolds over a month in 1970, the year Cruz left Cuba for Miami, when Castro put the country to work harvesting 10 million tons of sugar. An episodic family drama in the sad-funny slice-of-life vein of Anton Chekhov, the play dramatizes the slowburn desperation and aching dreams of a closely knit family of five. This family opens up its house to a Russian visitor en route to political asylum in Brazil; he stirs up trouble, engaging his hosts in heated rhetoric about Cold War politics and social values.

     "The whole concept of the revolution was such a mystery to me," Cruz says. "At the time, I didn't understand why we were leaving, why politics was such a strong force in our lives. I think my parents were concerned I would hit military age; I could have ended up in Angola. I had to write Park to understand that year of coming to America. I had to go back and grasp the essence. Park helped me understand my loss of innocence."

     Cruz's theatre is multilayered in its examination of how sudden shifts in the political landscape have crushed a way of life for Cuba's populace--but his plays aren't seared and singed by angel nationalist dogma or postcolonial disgust. Even the most political of his plays, 1998's Two Sisters and a Piano (scheduled to be revived at San Diego's Old Globe in March '04), declines to raise an accusatory fist against specifically named tyrants or dictators. Set in 1991, at the moment of perestroika, Two Sisters and a Piano is about a writer and a musician under house arrest in Cuba--two sisters who tremble with desire for the outside world, for free speech and for sexual liberation. The play dramatizes the brutal reality of oppression and dictatorial rule and expresses the bitter disillusionment of many Cuban exiles and dissident artists left behind. Because the play does not soil itself by naming Castro, an aura of disconcerting stasis lingers over it, suggesting that corruption, fear and misery were just as noxious during the time of Fulgencio Batista.

     "The politics in my plays are very simple," Cruz says. "Two Sisters is about women who make the best out of their lives, even though they live in very harsh conditions. They create a little paradise in their house; even though they are under arrest, they put out their beautiful china and lay down a tablecloth--they have dinner like queens. The play is about the integrity and dignity they show in the face of oppression."

     Like Marguerite Duras, a writer alluded to in Beauty of the Father, Cruz believes that to join a parry is to achieve political loss, because it means adhering to a certain mentality and living within a set of limitations. "The regimentation of belonging to a group forces you to abide to a certain political ideology," he says. "But what I'm interested in is the individual. I don't write with an agenda."

     Cruz has had many influences in his life as a writer. He discovered the poetry of Emily Dickinson in elementary school; he got involved in drama at a Miami community college where he became a member of Teresa Maria Rojas's Prometeo troupe; Paula Vogel offered him a full scholarship to attend her graduate playwriting program at Brown University, even though he had never graduated from college. But in its refusal to embrace an uncritical model of political identity, Cruz's sense of cubania most reflects the incalculable impact that Maria Irene Fornes has had on his development as an artist.

     There is little question that the lyrical politics of Fornes, who is also Cuban American--along with her intuitive search for a new theatrical grammar that issues organically from the emotional center--shaped Cruz to become the writer he is today. They met in Miami on a Friday in 1988. In short order, Fornes invited Cruz, who had been flirting with acting and directing, to join her now defunct INTAR Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory in New York. "Irene came to the college to do a workshop, and she liked what I had written," he recalls. "She said she had one space available at INTAR. She asked me if I wanted to take the workshop, but I had to make the decision right away." Cruz quit his job at a cargo airport, arranged to sleep on a friend's couch, borrowed a winter coat, took a train to New York on Sunday and attended Fornes's workshop beginning the neat Monday.

     "My whole life changed," he says.

     "I ruined Nilo for the rest of his life," Fornes deadpans.

     Far from it: Cruz learned to assemble his plays in the Fornes manner, where no premeditation or conceptual thinking is involved, where ideas per se are seen as unproductive, but the needs of the characters are paramount. "I come from the Irene Fornes School," Cruz says flatly. "You don't write a play about an idea--you write a play about characters. I think it's the only way to write. My impetus always begins with the characters; somehow later on I reflect on the political situation around those characters by asking, 'How does the human spirit transcend all this?'" So if, for instance, gay characters show up in his plays, their presence stems from unconscious impulses. "I'm very interested in writing about homosexuality," he says, "but rather than a conscious choice, it's a given, like the color blue. I am not a theme-oriented kind of writer. If a character happens to be gay, I just run with it. In fact, there are aspects of a gay sensibility in all my work."

     Nilo is very Cuban in the way he sees and reacts to things. It's very hard to separate him from Cuba. You feel that he's inviting you into a world that is not the kind you see every day. A door is opened, and you want to look.--Maria Irene Fornes

     The journey to Havana, whether literal or metaphorical, is treacherous. Decades after Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba, powerful feelings of loyalty and obligation to the country persist among Cuban exiles living in the U.S. At its most volatile, that sense of devotion exerts an ideological tug that yanks many Cuban writers and artists, inside and outside Cuba, like a heavy chain. It can be a trap. Fanatical Cuba supporters believe that stating anything critical in public is equivalent to an outright attack on the revolution. Exiled extremists dismiss as soft or spineless those artists who don't take a rigid anti-Castro stance. Left-wing hardliners on the island slam artists who devise ways to maintain their creative autonomy, calling them gusanos (worms, or traitors to the homeland).

     Cuban-American artists striving to uphold their personal sense of cubania in the U.S. are therefore placed in a difficult position. This paradox explains, in part, why Cruz identifies with Lorca just as strongly as Conchita and Marela, the female characters in Anna in the Tropics, feel kinship with Tolstoy's 19th-century heroine. "Lorca was controversial in Spain," Cruz says. "Because he denounced the upper class, he was called a communist. Because of my own work, I've been classified as a right-wing Cuban, and yet some Cubans in Miami see my work as not one-sided enough. People have a need to classify artists in categories. Lorca did not want to be classified; he was a nonconformist. He said, 'No, I'm more than that. I'm a poet.'"

     Like Lorca and Fornes, Cruz, the poet from Matanzas, frustrates those who would like to assign political labels to his plays and pin them down, like dead butterflies. To read this Cuban expatriate's plays merely on the basis of their promotion of a political agenda is to completely misconstrue his intention--and to overlook the luminous ways his writing proposes an image of cubania.

     This image, of a real world that ripens into a magical world, is articulated in fully theatrical terms. There is a thick humidity to the language in Cruz's plays. Consider the carnal undertone that runs underneath this bit of small talk between Julian and the love-besotted Marela in Anna in the Tropics:

     Juan Julian: It's curious, there are no mountains or hills here. Lots of sky I have noticed...And clouds....The largest clouds I've ever seen, as if they had soaked up the whole sea. It's all so flat all around. That's why the sky seems so much bigger here and infinite. Bigger than the sky I know back home. And there's so much light. There doesn't seem to be a place where one could hide.
     Marela: One can always find shade in the park. There's always a hiding place to be found, and if not, one can always hide behind light.
     Juan Julian: Really. And how does one hide behind light?
     (The women laugh nervously.)
     Marela: Depends what you are hiding from.
     Juan Julian: Perhaps light itself.
     Marela: Well, there are many kinds of light. The light of fires. The light of stars. The light that reflects off rivers. Light that penetrates through cracks. Then there's the type of light that reflects off the skin. Which one?
     Juan Julian: Perhaps the type that reflects off the skin.
     Marela: That's the most difficult one to escape.

     Cruz, as these lines attest, is a poet of flushed cadences and restless desire. Through words, he creates structures of feelings that capture the fragility of human relationships. His plays plunge into in-between spaces and in-between cracks: When in Anna in the Tropics, the lector, Juan Julian, kisses and embraces Conchita, the factory owner's eldest daughter, in plain sight of her husband, Palomo, the voyeurism is rendered truthfully, because Tolstoy's Anna Karenina--literature itself--hovers over the action like an indescribable cloud.

     A mysteriousness saturates and shrouds all of Cruz's work. He describes his high-flown style as "realism that is magical," meaning that immediate reality veers, going beyond logic and belief: vines of hair grow for kilometers in Park in Our House; the floating souls of two tango dancers appear suddenly on Miami Beach in Dancing on Her Knees; because of an aging disorder, a brother and sister in their forties, both survivors of Operation Pedro Pan, look a decade younger when they set foot in Cuba in 1998 (the year of Pope John Paul's historic visit) in Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams.

     Politics and magic make for strange bedfellows. Rooted in a solid sense of time and place, Anna in the Tropics represents something of a stylistic departure for Cruz--it is the first play in his oeuvre to paint a wholly naturalistic portrait of the dreams and dramas of Cubans outside the island. And yet this play, though old-fashioned in form, holds a deep love and sorrow for Cubans, no more or less than those other plays that elaborate upon a Cuba of the imagination.

     Nilo Cruz's plays transform theatrical language into a living image of the exile's experience. They are poetical chronicles of the human costs of harsh economic and political realities; they tell the truth about Cuba without dogmatic rants, manifestos or pronouncements. Cuba may be a politically conflicted island paradise swathed in the cold paint of poverty, lies, fanaticism, oppression and tyrannical structures. But in Cruz's fertile imagination, it is also a museum of dreams, of beauty, of love, of memory, of tradition, of humble lives mainly forgotten but passionately lived. Cuba is the light he finds most difficult to extinguish.