Castro's Cuba setting for Pulitzer winner's early play
Nilo Cruz knows the question is coming. Even over the phone, one senses him waiting for the question he has fielded countless times since receiving the Pulitzer Prize for drama for his remarkable "Anna in the Tropics" in 2003.
How has the Pulitzer changed your life?
"It was an enormous amount of weight on my shoulders," says the soft-spoken Cruz, who felt blessed, pressured and overwhelmed upon receiving the honor.
But he never felt he had to chase it, to follow that prizewinner with another. Instead, the Cuban-American playwright (the first Latino to win a Pulitzer for drama) felt he had to stay centered.
"You have to go back to your truth to write the next play. You have to be humble," says the gracious Cruz, whose 1995 play "A Park in our House," about a family living in Castro's Cuba during the 1970s, opens Monday at Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater in a co-production with Teatro Vista.
"Even if I were to write another 'Anna in the Tropics' with the same structure and a similar landscape, it wouldn't have the same validity as 'Anna' because times change, the world changes."
And of course Cruz has changed.
In 1970, at the age of 10, he emigrated with his family from Cuba to Florida. As a young man, he knew he wanted a career in theater. A college professor steered him toward directing. But in Miami, while directing a play by the woman who would become his mentor, Obie Award-winning Cuban-born playwright Maria Irene Fornes, he realized he wanted more.
"I wanted to own the work not just interpret someone else's work," says Cruz, 47.
Fornes urged him to write.
"She opened my imagination, allowing me to discover all the places you can go as a playwright," says Cruz, who studied with Fornes and Pulitzer-winner Paula Vogel before going on to teach writing himself at Brown, Iowa and Yale universities.
Although he still directs (his production of "Anna in the Tropics" recently concluded a 19-city tour of Spain), Cruz is known primarily as a playwright. Critics have praised his vivid, lyrical writing, which he attributes to coming from a family of storytellers, and to Cuba's culture, especially its music and specifically the bolero, which he describes as a celebration of sadness enveloped in a love song.
"Surrounded by that kind of music, it seeps into your blood, it's in your DNA," he says with a slight laugh.
Poetry and music infuse his work, which is influenced by Anton Chekhov ("His plays are character-driven. The plot is so immersed in the play you sometimes don't even notice it."); Tennessee Williams ("There's something about the sensuality in his work that intrigues me."); and Samuel Beckett ("The musicality and rhythms of his language I find fascinating.").
Cruz's strength rests with his ability to reach across cultural divides to convey universal themes, says Teatro Vista artistic director Edward Torres who describes the playwright as gentle, poetic, intelligent and passionate.
"Universality in today's modern age is a good thing," says Torres. "We have a specific culture, but we all have things in common. The beauty is his ability to communicate it to everyone else."
Each play starts with an image, says Cruz. "A Park in Our House" began with a scene from his childhood where he stood next to his mother while she cut up a piece of meat. Its fictionalized counterpart occurs at the end of Act One where an aunt offers her young nephew a lesson on life and love while carving up meat.
"Park" marks Victory Gardens' third production of a Cruz play. The theater staged "Anna" in 2003 mere months after it received the Pulitzer and 1999's "Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams" in 2005.
Victory Gardens "is one of the few theaters in Chicago that really responded to my work," says Cruz, one of VG's favorite guest playwrights.
While Cruz has set plays outside Cuba, the Caribbean nation has a hold on him.
"It's always fascinating to me how the country changes but doesn't really change," he says. "(Cuba) has so much courage. It's full of contradictions, and those contradictions make for good drama."
"A Park in Our House" is particularly resonant now that Cuba is confronting a change in leadership for the first time in almost 50 years.
"There's a lot going on in Cuba right now," says Torres. "'A Park in Our House' takes this lyrical, poetic approach to how people dealt with Castro and the revolution, which is ongoing."
"Because it's one of his earlier works it's even more poignant," says Torres. "There's a stroke of genius there."
Ultimately, Cruz wants to convey through his Cuban plays the strength and hopefulness of people living under extreme conditions.
"There are writers who have political agendas," he says. "I don't. I'm hoping to show people a slice of life, the struggles people go through and how, in spite of the situation, they're able to live."
"A Park in Our House" Where: Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago Times: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 9. Previews through Sunday. The show opens at 7:30 p.m. MondayTickets: $20-$35 (previews); $20-$45 (regular run)Phone: (773) 871-3000