âBeautifully strange⌠An opera star with a penchant for dramatic sorrow shows up at a doctorâs office, looking for her husbandâs heart. Someone got it when he diedâwhich means that somewhere, inside another personâs rib cage, a piece of her husband lives on⌠Thus begins a tantalizing correspondence in Nilo Cruzâs Exquisite Agony, a play about the human heart: its fumblings and yearnings, its bruises and scars, its generosity and viciousness.â âLaura Collins-Hughes, New York Times
âExquisite Agony is about a woman who finds life in death, in an atmosphere where poetic insights are the norm and women are the center. Cruzâs 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 donât know who we are because we donât know where life has landed on our bodies, let alone in our hearts.â âHilton Als, New Yorker
âExquisite Agony is explosive⌠As in several of Cruzâs previous works, drama ignites from the friction between the banal and the magical.â âZachary Stewart, TheaterMania
âExquisite Agony entertains and enraptures⌠Thereâs rueful humor, Chekhovian reveries, and a sense of the mystical⌠Ravishing on all levels.â âDarryl 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.
âBeautifully strange⌠An opera star with a penchant for dramatic sorrow shows up at a doctorâs office, looking for her husbandâs heart. Someone got it when he diedâwhich means that somewhere, inside another personâs rib cage, a piece of her husband lives on⌠Thus begins a tantalizing correspondence in Nilo Cruzâs Exquisite Agony, a play about the human heart: its fumblings and yearnings, its bruises and scars, its generosity and viciousness.â âLaura Collins-Hughes, New York Times
âExquisite Agony is about a woman who finds life in death, in an atmosphere where poetic insights are the norm and women are the center. Cruzâs 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 donât know who we are because we donât know where life has landed on our bodies, let alone in our hearts.â âHilton Als, New Yorker
âExquisite Agony is explosive⌠As in several of Cruzâs previous works, drama ignites from the friction between the banal and the magical.â âZachary Stewart, TheaterMania
âExquisite Agony entertains and enraptures⌠Thereâs rueful humor, Chekhovian reveries, and a sense of the mystical⌠Ravishing on all levels.â âDarryl 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.