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Nilo and the Topics: A Conversation with Nilo Cruz

Editor's note: This article was originally posted on Theatre Below Sea Level's blogspot on July 17, 2009. You can view the original post here.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Pulitzer-winner Nilo Cruz for some thoughts on playwriting. The interview was part of my learning process at the National Critics' Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT. The interview was brief, but very exciting for me. Here it is.

Connecticut is a long way from his native Cuba. It’s even further than his current home in New York. So, it should be no surprise that Nilo Cruz behaves a bit out-of-place, though this seems to have more to do with his nature and less with location. Slightly reserved with a soft-spoken voice, Cruz is an observer. At the Eugene O’Neill Playwriting Conference, where he has come to workshop his new play, The Color of Desire, he floats about various groups of artists like the New London fog, lingering pleasantly for a while before making a gentle exit.

Today he sits in a script library, wearing his trademark muted grays and speaking sweetly, accented at times by the soft tinkling of small metal bell on his necklace. He seems almost unaware of his status among the other names on the books surrounding him. For his play Anna in the Tropics, Cruz was honored with the Pulitzer in 2001, a first for a Latino playwright. As he speaks, he may lack the notorious pomposity of some of his theatrical counterparts, but he gently matches, possibly exceeds, their passion for the craft.

“I had an epiphany one day that I wanted to be involved in theatre… it was just a calling,” Cruz reminisces. He began as an actor but soon found that his interests lived in the story-telling aspects of the stage, specifically directing and writing. “I was writing before that. I had written some poetry but no plays per se. I was very much an avid reader in high school… I worked in the library because I wanted to be close to books. I always had a love of literature.”

This enthusiasm for the written word is perhaps most evident in the literary-framed Anna in the Tropics, a play about a lector (reader) in a cigar factory who uses the beautiful white world of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to help the cigar workers escape the worries of their humid Florida lives. “I thought it was going to be different than it turned out to be. I thought the piece was going to take place in the late 1800’s in Tampa, Florida and also in modern times in actual Cuba. But then through the research I discovered that the tradition (of factory lectors) came to an end in 1939, and I thought, ‘well that’s the time to set this piece’.”

Tolstoy’s novel creates a beautiful contrast to the world of ‘Anna,’ but Cruz had considered using other pieces of literature to tell his story. “I thought I needed a Russian novel. ‘Anna’ intrigued me because it was a book I read as a late teenager and it was a book that stayed with me. War and Peace is just too much.” he says with a slight laugh, “I took into consideration that many of the cigar labels were named after romantic stories so I thought, ‘it’s got to be this one (‘Anna’)’.”

This wondering writer keeps his eyes fixed on life around him. Drawing inspiration from a wide array of sources, Cruz can be often be found walking through the park with a small notebook and pen, stopping on a bench to craft and explore the worlds of his characters. “I always begin with characters. More than anything I do visualization. I try to imagine my characters in their natural habitat and I try to visualize their house and the climate around them. What they wear. What are their immediate needs.” Not surprisingly, Cruz collects pictures—photographs and prints of paintings—that he turns into a collage, shaping his characters’ lives.

“I immediately start writing scenes.” With this initial scene work and the images gathered, Cruz travels into his world where he can wander through as a presence, keeping record of the people and events there. “I put them together and keep them close to me while I write or where I put the play together. I use some of the scenes and some of them I don’t, but the one’s I don’t use are a form of exploration for the piece.” Once written, Cruz again takes on the role of the observer, this time at workshops. Here, he allows directors, dramaturges, and actors to give life to his work so that he may find moments of opportunity in the script or sections that need clarity.

Cruz continually looks ahead. Once a play is complete, he puts it away and moves on the next project. “It’s not that you abandon them, but you let them have their own life, sort of like your children.” With new plays and a musical project on the horizon, the playwright can not help but count the blessings of the past, among them his Pulitzer. “There is an expectation, but I try not to think about it. I try to be humble and go back to my work and just try to be a writer.”