{"id":125362,"date":"2026-02-27T19:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T19:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/125362\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T19:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T19:31:08","slug":"playwright-migdalia-cruz-looks-back-at-time-at-lec-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/125362\/","title":{"rendered":"Playwright Migdalia Cruz looks back at time at LEC, career"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prolific playwright Migdalia Cruz<\/a> knows the value of a teacher to a writer, a person who, as she puts it during a recent interview, can \u201chelp you reveal yourself to yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teachers can come in various forms. Perhaps none was a more influential mentor to the Nuyorican scribe \u2014 Cruz was raised in The Bronx by Puerto Rican immigrants \u2014 than Cuban-American writer Mar\u00eda Irene Forn\u00e9s, from whom she learned for years.<\/p>\n

However, those who helped shape her also include the late Jake Rufli, who taught theater at Lake Erie College<\/a> when Cruz was there decades ago, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and other professors at the Painesville school.<\/p>\n

Cruz is on the phone recently from her home in Irvington, New York \u2014 a few miles north of the Big Apple \u2014 to reflect on her path to writing and her career and to talk about her inventive take on \u201cMacbeth,\u201d soon to debut at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"WhileWhile working on a modern version of “Macbeth,” playwright Migdalia Cruz visited Scotland with her husband, James M. Kent and daughter Antonia Cruz-Kent. (James M. Kent)<\/p>\n

Cruz recalls her first play at the ripe age of 6 \u2014 inspired by having seen a marionette show and performed just for her family \u2014 called, she says, \u201cThe Birth of a Man Means Death to the Klan.\u201d It involved a tennis ball, representing a Black man, as \u201cpeople of color would bounce back,\u201d and tissues representing members of the Ku Klux Klan. (Let\u2019s just say those tissues met a fiery end.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps more impactful for her was the writing she did only a few years later when \u201cmy best friend was raped and murdered and thrown off the roof of our building.\u201d When her parents decided she was too young to attend the funeral, she began to reflect on how people are remembered by putting thoughts to paper.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sort of had this secret desire to be a writer,\u201d Cruz says, \u201cbut I never told anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s not kidding.<\/p>\n

After graduating from New York\u2019s specialized Stuyvesant High School at 16, she went on to Queens College, City University of New York to pursue a degree in math. There, however, she took what she believed to be a course about English historical figure Thomas Becket but that was, in fact, about Samuel Beckett, the Irish poet and playwright.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was surprised but also kind of secretly delighted,\u201d she says, \u201c and I thought, \u2018Oh, THIS is what a play is like!\u2019 \u2014 how beautiful his poetry was and how he really was able to knit words into human emotion.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then came a \u201cdramatic\u201d talk with her parents, in which they would have to start coming to terms with their daughter\u2019s burning desire to become an artist \u2014 not, say, a doctor \u2014 and to move away from home to begin this journey. Her parents were more comfortable with Ohio than other regions, as family members resided in Lorain and Youngstown.<\/p>\n

Truthfully, though, Cruz arrived in Painesville by way of Scotland.<\/p>\n

\u201cI landed on LEC, really, because of the brochure,\u201d she says. \u201cIt had a picture of Edinburgh on its cover, announcing its junior term abroad. I was, like, \u2018That\u2019s where I want to go.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

With her being one of seven theater majors at the school \u2014 which last year put its theater program into \u201cdormancy,\u201d according to a college official \u2014 she called her schooling intimate and personalized.<\/p>\n

Lake Erie College saw big changes to academic programming in 2025<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThat was when I began to take theater seriously,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

However, she admits it wasn\u2019t a tight fit with Rufli, a fixture of the LEC theater department for decades who died in 2016<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think Jake really understood me,\u201d Cruz says. \u201cI think he kind of tolerated me in his class and was, like, \u2018What do you want to do? You want to write? What do you want to write?\u201d He didn\u2019t get what I was about \u2014 he was really teaching acting and directing.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wasn\u2019t a playwriting teacher,\u201d she adds. \u201cI didn\u2019t get a real playwriting teacher until graduate school (at Columbia University in New York).\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, she was close to other teachers, including late Italian studies professor Egidio V. Lunardi, and appreciated an initiative by the college that allowed great course-scheduling flexibility to students who maintained a certain grade-point average. (Cruz was in the Mortar Board National College Honor Society and graduated magna cum laude, she says.)<\/p>\n

As you might imagine, Northeast Ohio was a bit of culture shock early on for Cruz.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just so small. And so quiet. For a long time, I think I had to sleep with the radio on just to have white noise in the background because I just couldn\u2019t get used to all the quiet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plus, she says, she could not relate to some of the female students \u2014 those enrolled in Lake Erie\u2019s highly respected equestrian studies program — as stables and horses were NOT components of her life in New York City.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoing to LEC was strange and alienating but fun in a weird way,\u201d Cruz says, singling out enjoyable experiences with the Lake Erie College Medieval & Renaissance Festival. \u201cI was like, \u2018Why are these people doing this?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cBut then I participated in it. It was actually a lot of fun, and I did learn about theater from it because they had Commedia dell’arte performances that were part of the Renaissance festival,\u201d she adds, referring to a form of improvisational theater dating to Italy in the 16th century.<\/p>\n

\"WhileWhile working on a modern version of “Macbeth,” playwright Migdalia Cruz visited Scotland with her husband, James M. Kent and daughter Antonia Cruz-Kent. (James M. Kent)<\/p>\n

She would go on to Columbia and then learn from Forn\u00e9s, who taught her to \u201ctell the truth and face the truth of who I was and where I came from and \u2026 the importance of being honest in your writing,\u201d Cruz says.<\/p>\n

Among her many works, she cites a couple as being pivotal to her finding her way: \u201cThe Have Little,\u201d about the friendship of two girls in The Bronx and what happens to them; and \u201cMiriam\u2019s Flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like it had helped establish my voice \u2026 . This is uniquely me and a story that I can tell,\u201d she says of the latter, a tale about a 7-year-old girl whose older brother is killed after he attempts to retrieve a baseball that had settled on railroad tracks. \u201cIt actually happened in my family \u2014 I had a cousin who died that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The Choir of Man\u2019 returning to Cleveland \u2014 with beer<\/a><\/p>\n

In more recent years, Cruz, 67, was contacted by Lue Douthit, the co-founder of Play on Shakespeare<\/a>, an organization that, according to its website, funds and supports contemporary modern-verse Shakespeare in theatrical practice, productions, and education, about being one of about 35 playwrights who would \u201ctranslate\u201d one of William Shakespeare\u2019s plays, which was to say to adapt one in a modern way.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of playwrights had scoffed at this because we were all like, \u2018What does that mean? Translate English to English? People are going to ridicule us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Cruz was intrigued, and after rejecting a handful of works Douthit suggested, including \u201cCymbeline\u201d and \u201cAntony and Cleopatra,\u201d her colleague asked her to pick from the list of unclaimed pieces.<\/p>\n

\u201cI looked and saw that Macbeth hadn\u2019t been chosen,\u201d she says of the well-known tragedy about a Scottish leader. \u201cI was like, \u2018What? THAT\u2019s my play.\u2019 And I don\u2019t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to ask for that.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I think the reason I knew that was my play, besides my obsession with Scotland, is that I feel that\u2019s a play that\u2019s really about people who are treated like \u2018the other.\u2019 And what happens when you treat people like the other is that they get filled with rage, and it leads to violence and a passionate response.\u201d<\/p>\n

She spent about two years just on the initial draft, she says, and took a family trip to Scotland to visit the grave of the real Macbeth at Reilig Odhr\u00e1in, on the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, off the country\u2019s coast.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took forever to get there from London \u2014 like, eight hours, 10 hours, you know, boats and trains and ferries,\u201d she says. \u201cBut when I finally got there \u2026 I really felt that I had landed in a place that was magical.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"OnOn a family trip to Scotland while working on her modern translation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Migdalia Cruz and daughter Antonia Cruz-Kent were joined by a cat “who followed us so closely I wondered whose spirit resided inside her.” (James M. Kent)<\/p>\n

Directed by Liam Vincent and slated to run from March 18 through April 5 at the Magic Theatre, Cruz\u2019s translation sets the story in 1970s New York City and places a greater importance on a certain female trio.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe witches don\u2019t just foretell the future; they actually create the future,\u201d she says. \u201cI wanted the women to run the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, she says, she wanted them \u201cto be portrayed by either people of color or queer people \u2026 people who are considered the other in the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n

Returning to the subject of teachers, Cruz also is one, saying that her degrees have been useful to that end. But for the young aspiring writer, the most important thing is finding a mentor \u2014 in whatever form \u2014 is what\u2019s most important to help you get going.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can read as many books as you want about playwriting, but you\u2019ll never know how to write a play unless you actually do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Learn more about the Magic Theatre\u2019s production of \u201cMacbeth\u201d at MagicTheatre.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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