Nilo Cruz

This lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Cruz imagines the catalytic effect the arrival of a new "lector" (who reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to the workers as they toil in the cigar factory) has on a Cuban-American family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land.

In his latest play, Nilo Cruz asks, What will we sacrifice in the name of love? A young woman named Marina reunites with her father Emiliano in his artistic home, populated by his worldly-wise female companion Paquita and the irresistible young Moroccan Karim, whom father and daughter both fall for. Set in the south of Spain, ""Beauty of the Father"" invokes the ghost of Federico Garcia Lorca, both with its lyrical language and as a character in...

Nilo Cruz is the most produced Cuban American playwright in the United States and was the first dramatist of Hispanic descent to receive the Pulitzer Prize. In his plays, Cruz almost always journeys back to Cuba, even when the play is not set there. 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 the strength and...

One of the United States' most-produced Cuban American writers, Nilo Cruz employs his signature poetic imagery and vivid language to tender and humorous effect in this pair of his newest works. "The Color of Desire," set in 1960 Havana, revolves around a passionate romance between an American businessman and an out-of-work Cuban actress. As the relationship becomes a metaphor for their countries' ruptured love affair, Cruz artfully weds magical realism...