A

lot of us would not be writers if it weren’t for Migdalia Cruz. A lot of us would not have taken chances on ourselves and seen our stories as important, were it not for Migdalia Cruz. A lot of us would not have careers without Migdalia Cruz. These are the first things to say, and tonight is the night to say them out loud.

Migdalia has written more than sixty plays. Which is crazy and wondrous at the same time. She is a Bronx girl through and through, a proud daughter of Puerto Rico, raised inside a city that taught her early what gets done to a body and what a body can do back.

This is what Migdalia does. She writes the body the American theater would rather not look at. Hairy. Hungry. Caged. Beautiful in ways that are not safe. She writes the gaze that makes the body monstrous and the body that turns the gaze around and devours it. She writes a Latina interior life as something other people imagine as exotic and that the woman herself has to live inside, whole, with appetites and fears and everything in between. Her work is funny in places where other writers would only be solemn, and brutal in places where other writers would look away. Courage and revelation are constant scene partners in her work. It is something to marvel at when experiencing it in real time, both on the page and live on stage.

Across her plays and theatrical writing — we see Migdalia returning again and again to a single argument: that we exist as we are. Not as anyone imagines us. Not sanitized for a season. Not made digestible for a board or for funders. But as we are, with our hungers, our griefs, our genealogies, our refusals.

And then there is the other body of work, which is the work she has done on the rest of us.

Migdalia studied with María Irene Fornés at the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Lab. Five residencies between 1984 and 1991. She was Fornés’s assistant. She is one of the few people alive who received Fornés’s method directly, sustained, in depth, over years. When Fornés got sick and could no longer teach, that lineage could have ended. Migdalia did not let it end. As a founding teacher of the Fornés Playwriting Workshop, in collaboration with Anne García-Romero, she has spent the last decade carrying Irene’s method into rooms across the country and the world. So many voices, some of them recipients of Dramatists Guild Awards themselves. As a co-chair of the DGF Playwriting Fellows. As a mentor at the Latinx Playwrights Circle. As a teacher at various institutions. There are playwrights with careers and a sense of purpose and belonging tonight–likely many of us in this room–because Migdalia stood with them and refused to let them lie about who they were.

Migdalia has said that when she met Irene Fornés, Irene “terrorized and inspired” her to tell the truth about who she was and where she came from. Migdalia has spent a lifetime telling that truth on the page, and a lifetime teaching the rest of us how to do the same.

Sixty plays. A whole school. A whole generation. The line from Irene to Migdalia to all of us — alive, taut, held in her hand. Migdalia, thank you. For the work. For the teaching. For the truth. And for inspiring us to do the same.

- DG AWARDS COMMITTEE

W hen I wrote my first play at age six, The Birth of a Man Means Death to The Klan, I never expected that at age 67, I would receive an award from my peers at DG to prove I have lived a full life in the theatre. From the South Bronx to Southeast Asia, from INTAR to Latino Chicago, Sundance to the Hermitage, the Roundabout to the National Theater of Greece, and then there was Mabou Mines, Kitchen Dog, and the Magic, and so many others, to whom I say tonight, thank you. Thank you to all of my loved ones, champions, accomplices, friends, supporters, haters, teachers, and detractors, who have held me up and held me accountable to my own journey on Earth. I am not alone on this trip. Never have been. Why was it important for me to keep on writing all these years? Stories to tell, people to remember, that only this Nuyorican woman could reveal on a blank page that waits—seductively and impatiently—for her.

My plays have crossed many borders—a basement in Iran, a Woman’s secret clubhouse in Egypt, a firehouse in Chicago, a subway station in Mexico City, a refugee camp in Dharamshala, a temple in Cambodia. My words, the words of this Nuyorican woman of mixed race—birthed from Taíno, Guanche, and Spanish ancestors—have traveled to extraordinary places with people who somehow see themselves in my work. This is my blessing.

You have given me the greatest gift, dear colleagues, the proof of life in perpetuity erasing any doubt that my words, my life, my sex, my thoughts, my people, are worthy of history, and poetry—and just in case someone dares stop me at the Great White theatre border and asks: Why you? I can show them my new DG passport proving that I have earned this life I fought fiercely for.

I will never stop remembering where I come from and writing from my viscera.

You see, “I’m a mother-fucking playwright. So, step off.”

Migdalia Cruz, pa’lante. ★

MIGDALIA CRUZ –