Exquisite Agony

Nilo Cruz

Mar 2020 · Theatre Communications Group

About this ebook

“Beautifully strange… An opera star with a penchant for dramatic sorrow shows up at a doctor’s office, looking for her husband’s heart. Someone got it when he died—which means that somewhere, inside another person’s rib cage, a piece of her husband lives on… Thus begins a tantalizing correspondence in Nilo Cruz’s Exquisite Agony, a play about the human heart: its fumblings and yearnings, its bruises and scars, its generosity and viciousness.” —Laura Collins-Hughes, New York Times

“Exquisite Agony is about a woman who finds life in death, in an atmosphere where poetic insights are the norm and women are the center. Cruz’s feminist view is one of the liberating aspects of his writing, as is a kind of magical realism that is not cloying but true to his characters, and to the fact of dispossession: sometimes we don’t know who we are because we don’t know where life has landed on our bodies, let alone in our hearts.” —Hilton Als, New Yorker

“Exquisite Agony is explosive… As in several of Cruz’s previous works, drama ignites from the friction between the banal and the magical.” —Zachary Stewart, TheaterMania

“Exquisite Agony entertains and enraptures… There’s rueful humor, Chekhovian reveries, and a sense of the mystical… Ravishing on all levels.” —Darryl Reilly, TheatreScene.net

Nilo Cruz is a Cuban-American playwright and director, and the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for his play Anna in the Tropics. His other plays include Sotto Voce, Beauty of the Father, Two Sisters and a Piano, Lorca in a Green Dress, Dancing on Her Knees, and Night Train to Bolina.

About the author

Nilo Cruz won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his play Anna in the Tropics, making him the first Latino to be so honored. He is author of more than 13 plays and four translations. He studied theater first at Miami-Dade Community College and later in NYC under fellow Cuban María Irene Fornés. Fornés recommended Cruz to Paula Vogel, who was then teaching at Brown University, where Cruz received his M.F.A. in 1994. He was playwright-in-residence at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, FL, where he wrote Anna in the Tropics, which received the Pulitzer and Steinberg prizes in 2003. Its Broadway premiere in 2004 starred Jimmy Smitts in the lead role. Plays by Cruz have been presented by the Public Theater, NY Theatre Workshop, Pasadena Playhouse, McCarter Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory, The Alliance, New Theatre, Florida Stage and the Coconut Grove Playhouse. He is an alumnus of New Dramatists and has taught playwriting at Brown University, the University of Iowa, Yale and University of Miami. In 2009, he received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career.