Violent Inscriptions: Writing the Body and Making Community in Four Plays by Migdalia Cruz

Abstract

Migdalia Cruz is a Nuyorican playwright from the South Bronx who studied under the mentorship of Maria Irene Fornes at the International Arts Relations (INTAR) Hispanic Playwright's Lab in New York City during the early to mid-1980s. The author of more than thirty plays, Cruz is one of the few among the current generation of Latina dramatists able to secure a series of grants and fellowships enabling her to work as a full-time professional playwright. Her plays have been commissioned nationwide by such established production houses as The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Playwright's Horizons, Cornerstone Theatre Company, INTAR, the W.O.W. Cafe, Theater for a New Audience, Arena Stage, and The Working Theater. A 1991 finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Cruz has also received critical recognition as an NEA and McKnight Playwrighting Fellow and a TCG/PEW National Artist in Residence. In 1995, Latino Chicago Theatre Company produced a season of her work that included Fur, Cigarettes and Moby Dick, and Lolita de Lares (on Lolita Lebron). [End Page 51] Published in several literary anthologies and texts for actors, 2 her dramatic writing represents a variety of genres with such wide-ranging works as Frida: The Story of Frida Kahlo (a musical), Telling Tales (a collection of monologues), and The Have-Little (realist drama). Cruz's willingness to experiment with different types of aesthetic forms and thematic content stems from her five years with Fornes at INTAR writing alongside other prominent voices in US Latina/o drama, including Cherríe Moraga, Caridad Svich, Carmen Rivera, and Nilo Cruz. In interviews, she credits her experiences in the lab, most especially through Moraga's political boldness and Fornes's inimitable commentary, for playing the largest role in her development as a playwright. Of her time with Fornes, Cruz says, "She was very tough on me. I had been writing things that didn't really have any meaning. I was thinking this is what I should be writing, or this is how writing sounds, or this is how you sound intelligent. Instead, she made me look inward and think about how people talk, what people say, who are the people I know best to write about." 3

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