The Haunting of Migdalia Cruz

In 2019, playwright Sheila Callaghan had a mad, beautiful idea: why not start a publishing imprint to amplify adventurous, underrepresented—or in the press’s log line, “badass”—playwrights whose challenging work too rarely reaches the stages of risk-averse American theatres? Sheila called it Tripwire Harlot Press and has, since founding, published some terrific, brain-on-fire writers, including Christina Anderson, Hansol Jung, Phillip Howze, Callaghan herself, and soon Sharon Bridgforth and Migdalia Cruz.

Maybe a play is impossible simply because it’s written by a woman over sixty without a Pulitzer or six-figure public honor to her name, despite being an artistic beacon to many of her theatre colleagues and students. 

Migdalia’s anthology launches in October under the title Impossible Plays. It’s a mind-blowing collection of three works that might never see stage light because, well, they’re impossible. This raises some scintillating questions: What makes a play impossible? Is it impossible to stage or impossible to fathom? Is it too expensive or too demanding? Does it defy convention—the agreed-upon possible—or dare theatres to dare more than they dare to? Is the woman who writes such a play an impossible person? Maybe a play is impossible simply because it’s written by a woman over sixty without a Pulitzer or six-figure public honor to her name, despite being an artistic beacon to many of her theatre colleagues and students. All of the above? 

And what makes a playwright badass? Refusing to make nice when writing about sex or empire or human-on-human violence? Refusing to give fucks that not-so-young-anymore writers become personae non gratae, expected to go quietly into the long night of their artistic maturity without so much as a party hat? 

However you define it, Migdalia Cruz qualifies. She eschews the merely possible and sets no limits on her wild, brutal, loving imagination. She won’t write down to audiences or to the people who program for them. In late 2023, Migdalia earned the honor of Legacy Playwright, together with important and irascible badass Frank Chin, a founding father of Asian American theatre. This honor was bestowed by the Legacy Playwright Initiative (LPI) at the Dramatists Guild Foundation, a national, multiyear project to shine light on playwrights deserving attention or re-discovery in a field that too often shuttles later-life artists aside. (LPI was the brainchild of longtime Lincoln Center Theatre dramaturg Anne Cattaneo, who gathered colleagues from across the profession to make it real. I currently direct the initiative, but, full disclosure, I don’t nominate or select winners.)

Some dramatic impossibilities braved by Migdalia Cruz: her plays are polymorphous; they cross time periods, genres, genders, and realities. She draws on myth, fairy tale, legend, and dream, as well as political, literary, and personal history, to extend the reach of her storytelling, sometimes all at once. A truism of pragmatic playwriting pedagogy holds that you can’t mess with both form and content at the same time, but Migdalia must have cut class that day. She even presumes to slam together multiple stories in a single play—take that, American theatre! No wonder Tripwire Harlot is publishing her in their Sledgehammer Series.

Many of Migdalia’s plays, from the very early Miriam’s Flowers to Fishtank and Two Roberts in this volume, live in limbo lands, the “where do I go now” purgatory of life just after death. She is our bard of the bardo, and, like that other, earlier bard, Migdalia loves a ghost. In her three impossible plays, I count at least eight of them, not including the ghost of her childhood in the Bronx and of Puerto Rico, where her people are from. Yes, place haunts you too, just like history.

“When you bury someone, where are they really? The ground? The sky?” Anabella asks in Fishtank, as she and her older sister Juliana attempt to clear out the roach-ridden, hoarder-crammed, trash heap of a house they’ve just inherited from their parents who died suddenly, one after another, in the pandemic. “Or are they still hanging around their house? Waiting to see if it sticks. Or if they can stick onto you?”

Of course Ma and Pop are still hanging around the house. There’s work to be done, haunting their daughters and making sure they find the buried treasure of their inheritance and the buried secrets of their family. The dead linger nearby, or maybe they permeate our bodies. Juliana wonders about that: “Because of the disease. So many people had to be burned. I wonder if the smoke could have blown you into the wind and then into my lungs, and if it did, would I know if you were still inside me somewhere, I mean, whenever I took a breath?”

Theatre is a physical, visceral art, and Migdalia’s writing works in and on the body, a site inseparable from the mind. “When Art, History, and Time braid together in my world,” she has written, “I feel it in my viscera. I feel a strength—in my convictions, my voice, my reason for being.” When Amador, the father in Fishtank, speaks from the outskirts of life, I hear what it must be like for Migdalia to write as she does: “When I was trying to breathe, I was going to all different times and places. My mind is a piece of tumbled sea glass. I passed through so many waves. So many changes. That’s what stories are: these word-waves that wash over me.”

And lest you think that only family haunts the living, consider the other five characters in Fishtank, each of whom steps out of pictures the now-dead parents stuck up on the wall above the smelly family aquarium: Martin (as in Luther King, Jr.), Robert (F. Kennedy), Shirley (Chisholm), and two Jesuses, one white and one black. They hang around, chatting and arguing, playing games, trying to remember their own lost lives. (I don’t want to spoil anything but there’s also, between the Black Jesus and the White one, some licking.)

Two Jesuses licking ain’t got nothing on the monstrous, psychosexual mayhem of Migdalia’s Satyricoño, inspired by Petronius’s writing (61 CE) and Fellini’s 1968 film, both orgiastic nightmares lit by the sputtering fires of imperial Rome. It’s the “future-present” of 2058-2064 CE amid “the chaos of the Ignited Dominions of Amerika—what’s left of what used to be the U.S.A.” This time the ghosts of the past and future lurk.

We have moved from the literal worship of civil rights era and Christian icons to a dystopic future of now, fashioned by every dictator ever, specifically the lineup Migdalia had in mind when she began the play early last decade: Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Trujillo, Castro, Bush. In Satyricoño her Emperor (the “Presidemperor”) diddles himself while “the whole world explodes,” so as our prophetic playwright foretold, the beat goes on. We enter not Mar-a-Lago but La Perla, a nightclub that has been “renovated and made magical. On one wall is a sea of genitalia, animatronic penises, vaginas, and breasts. Like an adult version of the “It’s a Small World” ride, there are patrons strewn about the club in gondolas, equipped with adult pleasuring devices and an intercom to order up pleasure partners or simply snack foods.” Two members of the royal entourage sit in a gondola, “wiping off their hands and genitalia with a wet wipe.”

We catch citizens of the Ignited Dominions of Amerika in individual spotlights:

Each one is trying to kill him or herself—unsuccessfully—over and over again. One slits his throat. One hangs herself. Two take poison. Another one hits his head repeatedly with a dictionary. One holds her head in a deep basin of water until she can no longer breathe—comes up for air, and then tries again. One takes line after line of cocaine—he is covered in white powder. These vignettes are performed to the music of [Fellini’s composer] Nino Rota.

Pig Latin is spoken here. The citizenry appears as Bunraku puppets. “There are many of them and they are all very sad.” And when the sister of the Presidemperor’s bastard son fists her nymphomaniac lover, the royal astrologer, “Sparks come flying from between her legs.” Yes, there will be dildos, French maid costumes, and hermaphrodites. No, it won’t play in Florida. One entrance will be made in a “chariot of fire.”

How many ways can you spell impossible?

Where are our theatre companies that would dedicate the years and resources necessary to cultivate audiences hungry enough to wander in such strange lands?

But why? We’ve seen dream plays before, sexual surrealism, political anarchy—I’m thinking Shakespeare, Goethe, Strindberg, Jarry, even Kushner our contemporary. (Oh, right, they’re men.) And what about the art world? What are theatrical spaces that would make room for the installations of a Joan Jonas or the attic of a Louise Bourgeois? Where are our theatre companies that would dedicate the years and resources necessary to cultivate audiences hungry enough to wander in such strange lands? Where, other than in that vague Everycity appellation “downtown” or in some romantic, experimental, Off-Off-Broadway past, can we celebrate the recesses of such a sensibility or the reaches of such a fantasy? (Tripwire Harlot seems to be asking and having asked, answered.)

Migdalia’s path was blazed by her great teacher and mentor, María Irene Fornés, and Migdalia has used her own fire to light that path for students and colleagues. She’s part of a contemporaneous cluster of Fornés’ Latine playwright progeny—including Eduardo Machado, Milcha Sanchez-Scott, Edwin Sanchez, Nilo Cruz, Cherrie Moraga, José Rivera, Luis Alfaro, Caridad Svich, Elaine Romero, Bernardo Solano, Octavio Solis, Anne García-Romero, Oliver Mayer, Ana María Simo, Lisa Loomer, and so many more—that ranks as one of the most stellar, influential writer dynasties of the past fifty years.

For Fornés the impossible play was the opposite of what you might imagine. It was the one that tried to anticipate its audience, as she told the Drama Review in 1977: “I think it is impossible to aim at an audience when writing a play. I never do. I think that is why some commercial productions fail. They are trying to create a product that is going to create a reaction, and they cannot. If they could, every play on Broadway that is done for that purpose would be a great success.”

Fornés’ teaching, famously, begins in the body and subconscious. When characters enter the writer’s imagination, she gives them a home and lets them tell her who they are, what they want, what they wish to do. Plays of the Fornés/Cruz variety feel to me precisely like dreams—worlds that could only be dreamt by this exact dreamer, built of her history and experience, possessing the idiosyncratic logic of her inner life, articulated in the unique, associative language of her personal tongue. “I wish I could write with my tongue,” the character Cornelius says in Two Roberts: A Pirate-Blues Project, Migdalia’s third impossible play. Based on Soul Train’s host/producer Don Cornelius, the character appears as a guide through the limbo of after-life along with a mythological figure named Epifani. “Tongues are more honest than fingers,” Cornelius explains. “A slip of the tongue reveals the truth and a slip of the fingers is just a mistake.”

Every human comes stocked with her own dense mysteries. The theatre is one improbable (but rich) attempt to illuminate those mysteries for each other. We sit together in the theatre and share our common stories. We glimpse the inner immensities that unite and divide us. I want both: the accessible commonalities and the mysterious distinctions, private visions, special language, and impossible interiority. I want the ungraspable mystery of the other person—that which is always out of reach.

Migdalia’s characters often live in proximity to just that. It’s true of the dead Ma and Pop and their daughters. It’s true of the characters in her 1995 play Fur, in which Michael, the owner of Joe’s Pet Shop, keeps the object of his impossible love/obsession—a hirsute beauty-as-beast named Citrona—locked in a cage, where he can see her but never touch her heart. Fur is a fairy tale of the unreachable heart’s desire or, better, “desire’s heart-fire,” a phrase Migdalia uses in a double Haiku she wrote for Fornés:

In six lines or less—

I must honor the teacher

who gave me the moon.

It was an honest,

clear, yet savage light, poured from

desire’s heart-fire.

Two Roberts: A Pirate-Blues Project takes this limbo of desire even further—into purgatory. Here Migdalia sledgehammers together the stories of two men from different centuries who, legend has it, sold their souls to the devil to succeed at their chosen professions—piracy and music—and to “score with ladies.” Roberto Cofresí—a nineteenth-century pirate and Robin Hood-like legend from Cabo Rojo, the southwest coast of Puerto Rico—outmaneuvered the United States, Spanish, and English navies for many years, sharing his booty with his landsmen and, in another sense, sharing his booty with women everywhere. The other ambitious adventurer is based on twentieth-century blues legend Robert Johnson, who likewise knew his way around the body of a guitar and that of a woman. (Speaking of an artist’s private associations, I love the way Migdalia lets us know that a statue of pirate Roberto Cofresí in Boqueron Bay has a nose “strikingly similar to my mother’s nose, also a native of Cabo Rojo.”)

The two Roberts find themselves shipwrecked in the afterlife, sharing a deserted island and condemned to watch their sidekicks and lovers wait for their return. They are “floaters” who will never return because, though they don’t yet know it, they’re dead. What happens to men who, having sold their souls to the devil, die? A question for their purgatorial guides:

Epifani: It took us a long time to come up with something that would really hurt.

Cornelius: Torturing the soul has very little to do with equipment anymore.

Epifani: No fiery treadmills to walk or gigantic burning noxious cogs to turn.

Cornelius: Eternal damnation is what happens when all you love is within arm’s reach—but it no longer recognizes you.

Epifani: They’re here for you, but they will never find you. You’ll see them searching and searching.

Cornelius: You’ll feel their hearts breaking.

Epifani: And they will never get to leave.

Cornelius: And you’ll watch them tortured—for eternity. All because of love.

Hell, for the dead, is other people—the still-living ones. The only way out is to let them go.

Roberto: The end. The moment when your eyes close is the only moment when you see yourself clearly—

Robert: --when you let yourself mourn all the people you left behind and they go on.

Roberto: Without you.

Robert: That’s it.

Roberto and Robert: The end.

Endings are never final for Migdalia. Her prolific body of more than sixty works for stage, radio, television, film, and podcast is haunted by love’s burn, the waters of death, and all that remains out of reach. Her plays are also fueled by the need to move on, hope for continuance. These three impossible ones each conclude with the words, “End of Play For Now…”

Where does her hope come from? This is what she says:

As my plays got bigger—in casting, in world view, and in exploration of adaptations and translations—my chances for production shrank. So why do I continue to write? It is an act of hope, of belief in the future, and a world filled with impossible plays improbably produced and performed on unlikely stages—is my idea of utopia.