Cecilie D. Keenan (Director) is a freelance director and producer who has been active in the Chicago Theater Community for over 20 years. She has been a director with Teatro Vista for 12 years credits include; The Messenger (an adaptation of the novel for the first Latino Fest at the Goodman), El Nogalar (at Millennium Park/Latino Festival and as part of Teatro Vista’s Residency at the Goodman Theatre), Dreamlandia, Another Part of the House and Living Out. Recently, Cecilie directed the Jeff Awarded Tobacco Road for American Blues Theater and Joel Drake Johnson’s End of the Tour for 16th Street Theater in Berwyn. Cecilie is the Producing Director at Teatro Vista. As an artist, she has been a frequent director and sometimes artistic and/or managing director at many Chicago Theaters, including ABT, Apple Tree, ATC, Bailiwick, Northlight and Collaboraction where she directed the hightly touted The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow .

Beauty of the Father Rehearsal - Photo by Anthony Aicardi

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca  (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936) was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of ‘27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads during the Spanish Civil War.    In 2008, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into Lorca’s death. The Garcia Lorca family eventually dropped objections to the excavation of a potential gravesite near Alfacar. However, no human remains were found.^[5][6]

Early years

García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town a few miles west of Granada, southern Spain. His father, Federico Garcia Rodriguez, was a landowner with a farm in the fertile vega surrounding Granada and a comfortable villa in the heart of the city. Rodriguez saw his fortunes rise with a boom in the sugar industry. García Lorca’s mother, Vincenta Lorca Romero, was a teacher and gifted pianist. In 1909, when the boy was 11, his family moved to the city of Granada. For the rest of his life, he maintained the importance of living close to the natural world, praising his upbringing in the country. In 1915, after graduating from secondary school, García Lorca attended Sacred Heart University. During this time his studies included law, literature and composition. Throughout his adolescence he felt a deeper affinity for theatre and music than literature, training fully as a classical pianist, his first artistic inspirations arising from the scores of Debussy, Chopin and Beethoven. Later, with his friendship with composer Manuel de Falla Spanish folklore became his muse. García Lorca did not begin a career in writing until his piano teacher died in 1916 and his first prose works such as “Nocturne”, “Ballade” and “Sonata” drew on musical forms. His milieu of young artists gathered in El Rinconcillo at the cafe Alameda in Granada. During 1916 and 1917, García Lorca traveled throughout Castile, Léon, and Galicia, in northern Spain, with a professor of his university, who also encouraged him to write his first book, Impresiones y Paisajes (Impressions and Landscapes – published 1918). Don Fernando de los Rios persuaded García Lorca’s parents to allow the boy to enrol at the progressive, Oxbridge-inspired Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid in 1919.

As a young writer

At the Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid García Lorca befriended Manuel de Falla, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and many other creative artists who were, or would become, influential across Spain. He was taken under the wing of the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, becoming close to playwright Eduardo Marquina and Gregorio Martínez Sierra, the Director of Madrid’s Teatro Eslava. In 1919–20, at Sierra’s invitation, he wrote and staged his first play, El maleficio de la mariposa (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell). It was a verse play dramatising the impossible love between a cockroach and a butterfly, with a supporting cast of other insects; it was laughed off stage by an unappreciative public after only four performances and influenced García Lorca’s attitude to the theatre-going public for the rest of his career. He would later claim that Mariana Pineda, written in 1927, was, in fact, his first play. During the time at the Residencia de estudiantes he pursued degrees in law and philosophy though he had more interest in writing than study.

García Lorca’s first book of poems was published in 1921, collecting work written from 1918 and selected with the help of his brother Francisco. They concern the themes of religious faith, isolation and nature that had filled his prose reflections. Early in 1922 at Granada García Lorca joined the composer Manuel de Falla in order to promote the Concurso de Cante Jondo, a festival dedicated to enhance flamenco performance. The year before Lorca had begun to write his Poema del cante jondo (Poem of the deep song, not published until 1931), so he naturally composed an essay on the art of flamenco, and began to speak publicly in support of the Concurso. At the music festival in June he met the celebrated Manuel Torre, a flamenco cantaor. The next year in Granada he also collaborated with Falla and others on the musical production of a play for children, adapted by Lorca from an Andalucian story. Inspired by the same structural form of sequence as “Deep song”, his collection Suites (1923) was never finished and not published until 1983.

Over the next few years García Lorca became increasingly involved in Spain’s avant-garde. He published poetry collections including Canciones (Songs) and Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads, 1928), which became his best known book of poetry. It was a highly stylised imitation of the ballads and poems that were still being told throughout the Spanish countryside. Philologists such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal worked with him to collect versions from the south, many in existence since the Middle Ages. García Lorca describes the work as a “carved altar piece” of Andalusia with “gypsies, horses, archangels, planets, its Jewish and Roman breezes, rivers, crimes, the everyday touch of the smuggler and the celestial note of the naked children of Córdoba. A book that hardly expresses visible Andalusia at all, but where the hidden Andalusia trembles”. In 1928, the book brought him fame across Spain and the Hispanic world, and he only gained notability as a playwright much later. For the rest of his life, the writer would search for the elements of Andaluce culture, trying to find its essence without resorting to the “picturesque” or the cliched use of “local colour”.

His second play Mariana Pineda, with stage settings by Salvador Dalí, opened to great acclaim in Barcelona in 1927. In 1926, García Lorca wrote the play The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife which would not be shown until the early 1930s. It was a farce about fantasy, based on the relationship between a flirtatious, petulant wife and a hen-pecked shoemaker.

From 1925 to 1928 he was passionately involved with Dalí. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí (decades later) rejected the erotic advances of the poet. With the success of “Gypsy Ballads”, came an estrangement from Dali and the breakdown of a love affair with sculptor Emilio Soriano Aladrén. These brought on an increasing depression, a situation exacerbated by his anguish over his homosexuality. He felt he was trapped between the persona of the successful author, which he was forced to maintain in public, and the tortured, authentic self, which he could only acknowledge in private. He also had the sense that he was being pigeon-holed as a “gypsy poet”. He wrote “The gypsies are a theme. And nothing more. I could just as well be a poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes. Besides, this gypsyism gives me the appearance of an uncultured, ignorant and primitive poet that you know very well I’m not. I don’t want to be typecast”. Growing estrangement between García Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when surrealists Dalí and Luis Buñuel collaborated on their 1929 film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). García Lorca interpreted it, perhaps erroneously, as a vicious attack upon himself. At this time Dalí also met his future wife Gala. Aware of these problems (though not perhaps of their causes), García Lorca’s family arranged for him to take a lengthy visit to the United States in 1929–30.

In June 1929, García Lorca travelled to America with Fernando de los Rios on the SS Olympic, a sister liner to the Titanic. They stayed mostly in New York City, where Rios started a lecture tour and García Lorca enrolled at Columbia University School of General Studies, funded by his parents. He studied English but as before, was more absorbed by writing than study. He also spent time in Vermont and later in Havana, Cuba. His collection Poeta en Nueva York (A poet in New York, published posthumously in 1942) explores alienation and isolation through some graphically experimental poetic techniques and was influenced by the Wall Street crash which he personally witnessed. This condemnation of urban capitalist society and materialistic modernity was a sharp departure from his earlier work and label as a folklorist. His play of this time El Público (The Public) was not published until the late 1970s and has never been published in its entirety, the manuscript lost. However, the Hispanic Society of America in New York City retains several of his personal letters.

Death

García Lorca left Madrid for his family home in Granada only three days before the Spanish Civil War broke out (July 1936). The Spanish political and social climate had greatly intensified after the murder of prominent monarchist and anti-Popular Front spokesman José Calvo Sotelo by Republican Assault Guards (Guardia de Asalto). García Lorca knew that he would be suspect to the rising right wing for his outspoken liberal views. On 18 August, his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, the leftist mayor of Granada, was shot. Lorca was arrested that same afternoon.

It is thought that García Lorca was shot and killed by Nationalist militia on 19 August 1936. The author Ian Gibson in his book The Assassination of García Lorca alleges that he was shot with three others (Joaquin Arcollas Cabezas, Francisco Galadi Mergal and Dioscoro Galindo Gonzalez) at a place known as the Fuente Grande, or Great Fountain in Spanish, which is on the road between Viznar and Alfacar.^[31]

Motives for assassination

Significant controversy remains about the motives and details of Lorca’s murder. Personal, non-political motives have also been suggested. García Lorca’s biographer, Stainton, states that his killers made remarks about his sexual orientation, suggesting that it played a role in his death. Ian Gibson suggests that García Lorca’s assassination was part of a campaign of mass killings intended to eliminate supporters of the Marxist Popular Front. However, Gibson proposes that rivalry between the anti-communist CEDA and the Falange was a major factor in Lorca’s death. Former CEDA Parliamentary Deputy, Ramon Ruiz Alonso not only arrested García Lorca at the Rosales’ home, but was also the one responsible for the original denunciation that led to the arrest warrant being issued.The dossier on the murder, compiled at Franco’s request and referred to by Gibson and others, has yet to surface.

Nilo Cruz (born 1960) is an Cuban-American playwright and pedagogue. With his award of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play, Anna in the Tropics, he became the first Latino so honored. 

Early years

Cruz was born to Tina and Nilo Cruz, Sr. in Matanzas, Cuba. The family immigrated to the “Little Havana” in Miami, Florida in 1970 on a Freedom Flight, and eventually naturalised to the United States. His interest in theater began with acting and directing in the early 1980s. He studied theater first at Miami-Dade Community College, later moving to New York City, where Cruz studied under fellow Cuban María Irene Fornés. Fornes recommended Cruz to Paula Vogel who was teaching at Brown University where he would later receive his M.F.A. in 1994.

Career

In 2001, he served as the playwright-in-residence for the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, where he wrote Anna in the Tropics, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer and the Steinberg Award for Best New Play. A year later it received its Broadway premiere with Jimmy Smitts in the lead role. He also has a sister named Clara Cruz who works as a Spanish teacher in Hialeah Gardens Elementary School in Hialeah, Florida.

Some of the theatres that have developed and performed his works include New York’s Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Pasadena Playhouse, McCarter Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory, The Alliance, New Theatre, Florida Stage and the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

Cruz wrote the book of the Frank Wildhorn/Jack Murphy musical Havana. Its scheduled world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse has been delayed by the theatre’s declaration of bankruptcy in 2010.

Cruz has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including two NEA/TCG National Theatre Artist Residency grants, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, San Francisco’s W. Alton Jones award, a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award and a USA Artist Fellowship.

Cruz is a frequent collaborator with Peruvian-American Latin Grammy composer Gabriela Lena Frank, collaborating on several operas. They recently completed a set of orchestral songs, “La centinela y la paloma” (The Keeper and the Dove), for Dawn Upshaw and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra to be premiered under the baton of Joana Carneiro in February 2011.

Cruz is an alumnus of New Dramatists, has taught playwriting at Brown University, the University of Iowa and at Yale University. He presently lives in New York City and Miami.

Plays

• Dancing on Her Knees (1994)
• Night Train to Bolina (1995)
• A Park in Our House (1995)
• Two Sisters and a Piano (1998)
• A Bicycle Country (1999)
• Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams (2001)
• Anna in the Tropics (2002)
• Lorca in a Green Dress (2003)
• Beauty of the Father (2006)
• Capriccio