"It was very difficult to do both, and that became a great conflict: being the father of my daughter and being the father of my plays — the conflict of not being able to be fully present," he says.
Thirst on the Street of Water will have four performances in Spanish with simultaneous translation into English at the Miami-Dade County Auditorium's Black Box Theater March 14-17.
According to the synopsis of the play, Thirst on the Street of Water is set in an asylum for the mentally ill and tells the story of an artist who falls into a depression after losing her daughter to an illness. The psychiatrist in charge of the case realizes that art is vital for the woman's well-being and may be the only path to her salvation.
"I wrote it in English, and Alexa Kuve translated it into Spanish," says the author, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama just over two decades ago with his work Anna in the Tropics. The original version of Thirst on the Street of Water had been shelved for four years when Kuve, the actress and producer who leads Arca Images and had already translated texts by Cruz, such as A Park in Our House, into Spanish, invited him to work again with the theater company.
Thirst on the Street of Water occurs in two time periods, Cruz explains: the past in which the characters live at the end of the 1920s in Mexico, at the height of muralism, and the present at the beginning of the 1930s in New York.
"It jumps from present to the past. Emma, who is American, falls in love here in the United States with this Mexican artist; they travel to Mexico, where both of them find their voices as artists," says Cruz. "When the relationship begins to break down, they try to cling to that past in which, in addition to finding their voice as artists, they found each other."
The work begins with a moment of crisis when a psychoanalyst tries to find out what happened in the painter's life, what is the reason for her disorder, and why she has stopped painting.
Daniel Romero, Claudia Tomás, playwright Nilo Cruz, and Carlos Acosta Milián
Photo by Roberto Santamarina
The fundamental difference between the text Cruz had shelved and the definitive version is the role of the psychologist, the playwright reveals. He was there only as a vehicle to get the protagonist out of her depressive state, but the playwright decided, he now says, to "give him a brush" in search of his individual struggle within the conflict of the play.
"Although the character says that his profession as a doctor prevents him from getting involved in the patient's conflict, the case is very similar to something that happened to him, and there is a mirage that also occurs between the present and the past," reveals Cruz. "In fact, there are several mirages in the work, and it was unintentional; everything came to me while writing the story, and I just wanted to accentuate them."
Cruz admits he has always been more interested in his characters than the plot. "And here the doctor realizes that he has to treat this patient in a different way, using her painting to try to get her out of the state she is in."
A writer's voice does not emerge overnight, according to Cruz. "You may think your first work is fabulous, but it's not," he says. "Training is very important, at least for me, as I am always training; I do it each time I write a work — I get to know another part of my being."
In this case, he reiterates, the echoes of his experience come to light: being a father or an artist.
"That put a lot of pressure on my relationship, and the relationship became very diluted," he recalls. "It was difficult. Now, it's like going back to that stage of my life but through these characters. When you write, there is a very intimate interest. A certain urgency to tell a story about problems in your life for which you did not find a solution. Even though you have those things hidden deep within yourself, they somehow come out in writing. You react to certain situations because you have lived them, and if you have lived them, you have a way to enter that world. It is a kind of a thoughtful catharsis."
The theme of a lost daughter had already appeared in another of his works, Beauty of the Father, which he wrote before Anna in the Tropics when he was living in New York.
"If you study the work of Marguerite Duras, you will see that there are themes that are repeated, and the same thing happens with (Antón) Chekhov: the sale of a house, a changing world, and how certain human beings are left behind," says Cruz. "I think that happens with all authors, themes that emerge again and again, and the process of investigating them from another point of view ends up being a redemption. It is the obsessive themes that create the character, the style of the artist."
Carlos Acosta Milián as the doctor and Claudia Tomás as a woman driven mad in Nilo Cruz’s Sed en la Calle del Agua
Photo by Roberto Santamarina
"Incredible that such a short text encapsulates so much," says the author and director. "It has a certain ambiguity because it is not known if they are selling the shoes because the child died or because they bought two pairs; one was too small, and he could not use them. My play can be reduced to this brief story," he adds.
It has been disputed that it was Hemingway who wrote it. In 1910, under the title "Tragedy of baby's death is revealed in sale of clothes," an article in the Spokane Press ran the classified "Baby's handmade trousseau and baby's bed for sale. Never been used," which could be the true source of the very short story attributed to Hemingway.
Cruz not only wrote the play but is directing it.
"I am working with Claudia Tomás and Daniel Romero, two actors that I recently discovered and who were in my last play, A Park in Our House," he says. "In real life, they are a couple, very young, recently arrived from Cuba. They are artists passionate about theater. There is a certain intimacy in the protagonists of Thirst on the Street of Water that comes very easily to them because they are a couple, and they are also obsessed with theater, with art, just like these characters. So, half of my work was already done when I chose them."
He had never worked with Orlando Urdaneta, he says. He had seen him in several productions, they had met before, and the Venezuelan actor had expressed his desire to act in one of his plays.
"I saw him recently at a performance. I told him that I was preparing this play and that maybe he would be interested in playing a character; I offered it to him, he read it, and he liked it," says Cruz. "And Carlos Acosta Milián is an actor with whom I have worked a lot: he played a doctor in Exquisite Agony and was also in Lorca in a Green Dress and Baño de Luna; [he's] a veteran of my theater in this city."
For Cruz, the process of bringing the characters to life with the actors becomes the final phase of writing.
"You're exploring the text, seeing how it works in that third space that is the theater, and wondering how to deal with human behavior on a set, which in this case is basically a circle on the floor," he says, adding, "I asked the set designer for something that looked like a moon, regarding the concept of the lunatic and the circle at the same time. It helps to recreate the three times: past, present, and future."
– Jose Antonio Evora, ArtburstMiami.com
Sed en la Calle del Agua. 8 p.m. Thursday, March 14, through Saturday, March 16, and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 17, at Miami-Dade County Auditorium, 2901 W. Flagler St., Miami; arcaimages.org. Tickets cost $25 to $30 via ticketmaster.com.
