Beauty of the Father

Nilo Cruz is quickly becoming one of my favorite playwrights. Here are some quotes from his gorgeous play, Beauty of the Father, about the ghost of the Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca and his conversations with the living protagonists; a Spanish father and his American daughter.

Oscar Issac as the poet, Lorca. Courtesy of Broadway World

LORCA. 

I constantly have to remind myself that I'm only a spirit and I have to look at life from a distance and not get too involved with humanity. But the living have a way of beckoning us back to life through prayer or a work of art... and it's only natural that we respond, because as spirits we have our little sad attachments to the world, and there's always work to be done.

LORCA.

I was a fool like you. I don't remember ever finding love in life. Faces and the forms of human bodies, that's all I ever found. Love has always been a thick forest that  I've never been able to enter, and all I've known is the promise of the trees.

PAQUITA.

I met him standing in front of one of his paintings. I was looking at a picture and fell in love with him through his work.

LORCA.

You are an artist, and that's like being a father to many children. Consider the heart doctor, who has listened to more than a million heartbeats, but never really gets to understand the secret language of hearts... But you are a creator and artists sometimes tap into the mystery of all these things.

 

LORCA.

Tonight you will go to bed companionless and perhaps discontent at the violence of life, and when sleep comes, you will unwind yourself like the string of a kite in the air, then you'll feel the weightlessness of your human soul and realize that the sadness in your being when measured against the weight of the world might seem very little.