Prolific playwright Migdalia Cruz knows the value of a teacher to a writer, a person who, as she puts it during a recent interview, can “help you reveal yourself to yourself.” Teachers can come in various forms. Perhaps none was a more influential mentor to the Nuyorican scribe — Cruz was rais ed in The Bronx by Puerto Rican immigrants — than Cuban-American writer María Irene Fornés, from whom she learned for years. However, those who helped shape her also include the late Jake Rufli, who taught theater at Lake Erie College when Cruz was there decades ago, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and other professors at the Painesville school. Cruz is on the phone recently from her home in Irvington, New York — a few miles north of the Big Apple — to reflect on her path to writing and her career and to talk about her inventive take on “Macbeth,” soon to debut at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. While 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) Cruz recalls her first play at the ripe age of 6 — inspired by having seen a marionette show and performed just for her family — called, she says, “The Birth of a Man Means Death to the Klan.” It involved a tennis ball, representing a Black man, as “people of color would bounce back,” and tissues representing members of the Ku Klux Klan. (Let’s just say those tissues met a fiery end.) Perhaps more impactful for her was the writing she did only a few years later when “my best friend was raped and murdered and thrown off the roof of our building.” 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. “I sort of had this secret desire to be a writer,” Cruz says, “but I never told anybody.” She’s not kidding. After graduating from New York’s 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. “I was surprised but also kind of secretly delighted,” she says, “ and I thought, ‘Oh, THIS is what a play is like!’ — how beautiful his poetry was and how he really was able to knit words into human emotion. “That’s what I wanted to do.” Then came a “dramatic” talk with her parents, in which they would have to start coming to terms with their daughter’s burning desire to become an artist — not, say, a doctor — 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. Truthfully, though, Cruz arrived in Painesville by way of Scotland. “I landed on LEC, really, because of the brochure,” she says. “It had a picture of Edinburgh on its cover, announcing its junior term abroad. I was, like, ‘That’s where I want to go.’” With her being one of seven theater majors at the school — which last year put its theater program into “dormancy,” according to a college official — she called her schooling intimate and personalized. Lake Erie College saw big changes to academic programming in 2025 “That was when I began to take theater seriously,” she says. However, she admits it wasn’t a tight fit with Rufli, a fixture of the LEC theater department for decades who died in 2016. “I don’t think Jake really understood me,” Cruz says. “I think he kind of tolerated me in his class and was, like, ‘What do you want to do? You want to write? What do you want to write?” He didn’t get what I was about — he was really teaching acting and directing. “He wasn’t a playwriting teacher,” she adds. “I didn’t get a real playwriting teacher until graduate school (at Columbia University in New York).” 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.) As you might imagine, Northeast Ohio was a bit of culture shock early on for Cruz. “It 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’t get used to all the quiet.” Plus, she says, she could not relate to some of the female students — those enrolled in Lake Erie’s highly respected equestrian studies program -- as stables and horses were NOT components of her life in New York City. “Going to LEC was strange and alienating but fun in a weird way,” Cruz says, singling out enjoyable experiences with the Lake Erie College Medieval Renaissance Festival. “I was like, ‘Why are these people doing this?’ “But 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,” she adds, referring to a form of improvisational theater dating to Italy in the 16th century. While 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) She would go on to Columbia and then learn from Fornés, who taught her to “tell the truth and face the truth of who I was and where I came from and … the importance of being honest in your writing,” Cruz says. Among her many works, she cites a couple as being pivotal to her finding her way: “The Have Little,” about the friendship of two girls in The Bronx and what happens to them; and “Miriam’s Flowers.” “I feel like it had helped establish my voice … . This is uniquely me and a story that I can tell,” 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. “It actually happened in my family — I had a cousin who died that way.” ‘The Choir of Man’ returning to Cleveland — with beer In more recent years, Cruz, 67, was contacted by Lue Douthit, the co-founder of Play on Shakespeare, 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 “translate” one of William Shakespeare’s plays, which was to say to adapt one in a modern way. “A lot of playwrights had scoffed at this because we were all like, ‘What does that mean? Translate English to English? People are going to ridicule us.” Still, Cruz was intrigued, and after rejecting a handful of works Douthit suggested, including “Cymbeline” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” her colleague asked her to pick from the list of unclaimed pieces. “I looked and saw that Macbeth hadn’t been chosen,” she says of the well-known tragedy about a Scottish leader. “I was like, ‘What? THAT’s my play.’ And I don’t know why it hadn't occurred to me to ask for that. “And I think the reason I knew that was my play, besides my obsession with Scotland, is that I feel that’s a play that’s really about people who are treated like ‘the other.’ 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.” 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 Odhráin, on the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, off the country’s coast. “It took forever to get there from London — like, eight hours, 10 hours, you know, boats and trains and ferries,” she says. “But when I finally got there … I really felt that I had landed in a place that was magical.” On 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) Directed by Liam Vincent and slated to run from March 18 through April 5 at the Magic Theatre, Cruz’s translation sets the story in 1970s New York City and places a greater importance on a certain female trio. “The witches don’t just foretell the future; they actually create the future,” she says. “I wanted the women to run the world.” And, she says, she wanted them “to be portrayed by either people of color or queer people … people who are considered the other in the 21st century.” 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 — in whatever form — is what’s most important to help you get going. “You can read as many books as you want about playwriting, but you’ll never know how to write a play unless you actually do it.” Learn more about the Magic Theatre’s production of “Macbeth” at MagicTheatre.org.   ...read more read less