GHOSTS AND HOSTS.(Beauty of the Father)(Theater Review)

In an era when writing dialogue comes more naturally to most authors than intellection does, Nilo Cruz is an anomaly. Unlike a number of his contemporaries--Neil LaBute, Richard Greenberg, Kathleen Tolan--the forty-two-year-old Cruz is not a screenwriter in playwright's clothing; he does not write flat, naturalistic exchanges, tailored more or less to the demands of plot. He is a writer of ideas, who fills the stage with a kind of lush dramatic literature, unifying character with thought and action in time and space. Instead of giving us the mind-numbing, sub-Budd Schulberg "real" talk we usually hear when a contemporary American character shows up onstage, Cruz conducts arias with his pen, as he did in a lyrical passage from his 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Anna in the Tropics":

Oh, I don't want this night to end. I could stay up all night. I don't want to sleep. We sleep too much. We spend more than a third of our lives sleeping, sleeping. Darkness descends and everything is a mystery to us. We don't know if trees really walk at night, as I've heard in legends. We don't really know if statues and spirits dance in the squares unbeknown to us. And how would we ever know if we sleep? We sleep and sleep . . .

One doesn't need to be told that the speaker here, a character called Marela, is young, or that she is growing up in Tampa, Florida, in 1929, or that she laps up dreams like water reflecting the moon. Cruz lets Marela show us these things, with the languor of her speech and with her commonplace philosophies, which resemble those of Chekhov's characters, with a little of Tennessee Williams's "Rose Tattoo" thrown in as well. But perhaps Cruz's primary influence is a Brazilian one. In his dialogue and in his sharp shifts of perception, one hears the nineteenth-century writer Machado de Assis, whose extraordinary novels--"Epitaph of a Small Winner," "Philosopher or Dog?," and "Dom Casmurro," among others--are playful in form and thus thought, but are never without heart.

Born in Cuba in 1964, Cruz was the first Hispanic to win the Pulitzer for drama. His family fled to Miami in 1970, and he was inspired to write by his mother, who gave him his first typewriter. As a child of el exilio, Cruz grew up with his two great themes: politics and memory. He explores those interlocking subjects again and again, like a surgeon trying to determine why the heart bleeds.

Cruz's new play, "Beauty of the Father" (a Manhattan Theatre Club production at City Center), opens with the ghost of Federico Garcia Lorca (the brilliant Oscar Isaac) facing the audience and saying, "Five o'clock in the afternoon. The hour that bullfighters get killed. There was no death today at five o'clock in the afternoon. No, no death reported. Perhaps there was a wound. But there is always a wound in the world, open and exposed for everybody to see, and a little sand bucket of tears by the edge of the sea." The "wound" that Cruz is introducing here has been inflicted on a father, Emiliano (Ritchie Coster), and his daughter, Marina (Elizabeth Rodriguez). Emiliano, who is pursuing his life as a painter in Spain, hasn't seen his daughter in almost ten years. His most consistent companion, in his studio by the sea, is Lorca: his ectoplasmic father, in a white linen suit, who allows and encourages Emiliano to be what he is (and what Lorca was)--an artist and a homosexual.

Emiliano is also looked after by his friend Paquita (the incomparable Priscilla Lopez), who loves him enough to marry his sometime lover, a Moroccan named Karim (Pedro Pascal), in order to keep him in the country. When Marina arrives for a visit, in a lovely print dress, what follows is inevitable, at least from a dramatic point of view: Karim falls in love with her. Marina falls, too, but tries to persuade Karim to stay with Emiliano, either as a son or as a lover. "Because I want to do for him what he couldn't do for me," she says. "Because I want to show him that I accept him for who ...