Photo by Deborah Lopez
MIGDALIA CRUZ is an award-winning multi-platform playwright, translator, librettist and lyricist who has written more than sixty plays, operas, screenplays, and musicals. Her work has been produced across the U.S. and abroad at various venues including: Mabou Mines, Classic Stage Company, Playwrights Horizons, INTAR, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Monarch Theater, En-Garde Arts, HOME, Shaliko Company, New York Shakespeare Festival’s Festival Latino, Theatre For The New City, and the W.O.W. Cafe (New York); Ateneo Puertorriqueño (PR); National Theater of Greece(Athens); Foro Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Mexico City); Old Red Lion (London, England); Vancouver Players (Vancouver, B.C.); Latino Chicago Theater Company (Chicago); Houston Grand Opera (Houston); American Repertory Theatre (Cambridge); Cleveland Public Theatre (Cleveland); Frank Theatre (Minneapolis); Théâtre d’aujourd hui (Montreal); American Music Theatre Festival (Philadelphia); Intersection for the Arts/LATA (San Francisco); and Cornerstone Theater Company (Los Angeles), among others. She has been nurtured by Maria Irene Fornés’ Playwrights’ Laboratory at INTAR; Royal Court Theatre/New Dramatists Exchange ’94 (London); Steppenwolf Theatre’s New PlaysLab (Chicago); Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival ’94, Festival Latino’93 at Teatro Mision (San Francisco); the Sundance Institute; Midwest PlayLabs; Mark Taper Forum’s New Play Festival; Omaha Magic Theatre; “Songs from Coconut Hill” Theater Festival ’05; South Coast Rep’s HPP ’04, and was writer-in-residence at Latino Chicago Theater Company from 1991-98. Her plays include: Salt, Fur, Miriam’s Flowers, Lucy Loves Me, Dreams of Home, Telling Tales, ¡CHE-CHE-CHE!, Latins In La-La Land, Cigarettes and Moby-Dick, Lolita de Lares, Yellow Eyes, and Running For Blood: No. 3 (a radio play). She wrote book and lyrics for the musicals Rushing Waters, Welcome Back To Salamanca and When Galaxy Six and The Bronx Collide; the libretto for an opera, Street Sense; and lyrics and monologues for Frida: The Story of Frida Kahlo. Her plays and monologues are published by Edinburgh University Press, ACMRS Press, Manchester University Press, TripwireHarlot Press, NoPassport Press, Theatre Communications Group, U. of Arizona Press, Routledge Press, Penguin Books, Arte Publico Press, Applause Books, Smith & Kraus Publishers, SIU Press, and Third Woman Press. She taught playwriting at Princeton University, U.of Iowa/Playwrights’ Workshop, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and at Amherst College, and guest lectured at Yale University, Wesleyan University, Mount Holyoke College, and Columbia University. She co-taught with John Jesurun, for the Monarch Theater @LaMama (NY) in 2010. She was a co-facilitator for Rising Circle’s 2014 INKtank for emerging writers of color. In October 2021, she taught her fourth Fornés Playwriting Workshop with Anne Garcia-Romero & she also led the 2018 LaMaMa/Umbria Playwrights’ Retreat in Spoleto, Italy. She received commissions from Clubbed Thumb, Mabou Mines, NYSF’s Public Theater, Crossroads Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Latino Chicago Theater Company, Arena Stage, The Homebound Project, Planet Connections, WNYC-radio, Ballet Hispanico, DUO, and INTAR. Migdalia was awarded the 2013 Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright Award (NYCommTrust), and is a 1996 recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays award for Another Part Of The House. Her play, The Have-little was the runner-up for the 1991 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and SALT was a 1997 runner-up. She participated in Obsidian Theatre of Toronto’s International Playwrights Festival in 2009, won a 2016 NYFA grant, 2005 Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and a 1994 Connecticut Commission on The Arts grant for playwriting. At Classic Stage Company, she was a 1994 PEW/TCG National Artist in Residence. Migdalia was a 1997-98 Sackler Fellow at Connecticut Rep/UConn, a 1991 & 1995 NEA Playwriting Fellow, a 1988 McKnight Fellow, and received her MFA degree from Columbia University. She was nurtured by María Irene Fornés @ INTAR, the Lark–translating four plays for the LARK’s Mexico/U.S. Word Exchange, 2008-2013, and Sundance. She is the 2019-2021 co-chair of the DGF Playwriting Fellows with Lucy Thurber, a mentor to the NYC Latinx Playwrights Circle; and received a commission from Clubbed Thumb via NYSCA to write Fish Tank, and INTAR to write Lives of the New Kind of Saints with composer, Cristian Amigo. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and was born and raised in the Bronx.
Recent Projects: Fish Tank @ Clubbed Thumb (Jan2022); lookinglass: some thoughts on day four@ PlanetConnections, June 2020; Meat & Other Broken Promises @Homebound 4th Edition, July 2020; Never Moscow workshopped at U. of Evansville, November 2020; Richard III translation (a PlayOn!Shakespeare Project) @TheatreSpace NorthEast (Sunderland, England), Summer 2021, and Macbeth in 2020, also produced in 2018 by Actors’ Shakespeare Company in Boston & the African-American Shakespeare Company in San Francisco & at CSC at the PlayOnFestival in NYC (2019); a geo-located performance in Battery Park, Lives of the New Kind of Saints @INTAR, November 2020; FUR produced by Boundless and presented at NextDoor@NYTW, 2019; The Book of Miaou: Don’t Drink Everything Your Mother Pours You @ Princeton University, in conjunction with the Fornés Symposium in April 2018; El Grito del Bronx at Brown University(4/14), NYU/Tisch (4/08), at the Milagros Theatre (OR) 4/09, and at the Goodman in a co-production with Teatro Vista & CollaborAction (IL), 7/09; She developed Two Roberts: A Pirate-Blues Project at the Lark (NY) with a 2010 NYSCA grant; Petronius’ (69a.d.) & Fellini’s (1968) Satyricon inspires her Satyricoño about 21st C. America; and is at work on a play about Chekhov, marriage & his death by consumption as he wrote the Three Sisters, called Never Moscow. Telling Tales was produced in Santurce, P.R., Interacto (1/13); and Lucy Loves Me, was produced by INTAR in 2/13. In 2015, 2017 & 2018, FRIDA@ Long Beach Theatre, Michigan Opera Theatre, and Anchorage Opera Company. A Cold Spring Awakening at Half-Moon Theater’s “all you can eat” play festival @ the Culinary Institute of America (Poughkeepsie, NY); Yellow Eyes @ Visión Latino (Chicago); Latins In La-La Land at the College of Wooster (OH). 2016: FUR @ Hero Theatre’s Festival Irene (L.A.) & Venus Theatre (D.C.); Lolita de Lares @ Urban Theater Company (Chicago). Her Macbeth translation can be heard in a podcast via ncpodcast.com, launched in April 2021, and will be presented in a staged reading by BlackGirlsLoveTheBard, October 2021. In June 2021, Yorick’s Last Laugh: a dead comedy jam wherein he spills the “T” about the Danish royal family premiered at Shakespeare Dallas. Macbeth was published by ACMRS Press, Arizona State/Tempe, 2021.
Twitter & Instagram: @michiMigdalia