The Playwright’s Pedagogic Legacy: A Conversation with Migdalia Cruz and Mac Wellman

Photo by Deborah Lopez

MIGDALIA CRUZ is an award-winning playwright who has written more than fifty 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, and Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others. 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). Cruz 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. In 1996, she received the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays Award for Another Part Of The House, and she has been honored with the Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright Award. Over the course of her career, Cruz has been a PEW/TCG National Artist in Residence at Classic Stage Company, a Sackler Fellow at Connecticut Rep/UConn, an NEA Playwriting Fellow, and a McKnight Fellow. Her recent projects include Yellow Eyes at Visión Latino in Chicago and Latins in La-La Land at College of Wooster, Ohio. She is currently writing a play about Chekhov, marriage, consumption, and the writing of Three Sisters as Chekhov is dying. Lear more at www.migdaliacruz.com

MAC WELLMAN’s recent work includes: The Offending Gesture, directed by Meghan Finn at the Connelly Theater in 2016; Horrocks (and Toutatis Too) Woo World Wu at Emerson College in Boston in 2013 (with Erin Mallon & Tim Sirgusa); Muazzez at the Chocolate Factory (PS122’s COIL Festival) with Steve Mellor in 2014; 3 2’s; or AFAR at Dixon Place in 2011; The Difficulty of Crossing a Field (with composer David Lang) at Montclair in 2006 (and elsewhere more recently); and 1965 UU for performer Paul Lazar, directed by Stephen Mellor at the Chocolate Factory in 2008. He has received numerous honors including NEA, Guggenheim, and Foundation of Contemporary Arts fellowships. He received his third OBIE Award in 2003 for Lifetime Achievement. In 2006 his third novel, Q’s Q, was published by Green Integer, and in 2008 a volume of stories, A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds, was published by Trip Street Press as well as a new collection of plays, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, from Minnesota Press. His books of poetry include Miniature (2002), Strange Elegies (2006), Split the Stick (2012), and Left Glove (2011). His novel, Linda Perdido, won the 2011 FC2 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction. He is Distinguished Professor of Play Writing at Brooklyn College. Learn more at www.macwellman.com

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