An internet research tool about Miguel Pinero
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Biography
Birth: Miguel Piñero born on Dec. 19 1946 in Gurabo, in east central Puerto Rico. His birth name was Miguel Antonio Gomez Piñero. He was the oldest child of Adelina Piñero and Miguel Angel Gomez Ramos in a family with four children.
Childhood: Since his childhood, Piñero and his family lived in poverty. His family moved to New York City—Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Shortly, his father left the family and Adelina and her children were forced out of her home. They survived on welfare. At school, Piñero was a troubled child. He was transferred to three different schools because of truancy. He learned how to survive in the tough streets as the hip youth, “Mickey.”
Piñero’s early influences included his mother was a novice fiction writer and like his father, loved to tell stories. Piñero also wrote small pieces of fiction during his youth. However, his passion for fiction did not keep him from crime and drugs. In 1961, he was sent to the Otisville Training School for Boys—a reform school for troubled young men. In 1963, he committed his first major crime—burglarizing a jewelry store—and was sentenced to three years at NY prison at Rikers Island.
Young Adult: Piñero finally got out of prison at the age of nineteen. His first hand experience at prison life informed many of his best works. However, prison has also turned him into a heroin addict and an expert at petty crime. Piñero attempted to reform. For a while, he attended a rehabilitation center and joined an anti-drug Puerto Rican gang—the Young Lords. Shortly, he relapsed into drugs and crimes to support his habit. He was sentenced to Rikers for three years for drug possession and later to the Manhattan State Hospital. He was able to earn his high school equivalency certificate in the hospital. Yet, he resorted to drugs and crime after he was released. In 1971, Piñero was sentenced to the New York State Penitentiary at Ossining (Sing Sing).
Career: Prison provided the substance for his writing. When directors Clay Stevenson and Marvin Felix Camillo came to Sing Sing to organize a theater workshop, Piñero enlisted Camillo’s aid as a mentor. Piñero entered his poem, “Black Woman with a Blond Wig on” in a contest and won $50.00. This marked the beginning of the writer’s professional career. Camillo helped Piñero write short plays and skits. The products of the theater workshop, which included many of Piñero’s works, were performed live before inmates, prison officials and The New York Times theater critic, who gave the performance a flattering review. When he was paroled, Piñero joined the Family at the Theatre of Riverside Church—a theater troupe composed of ex-convicts and ex-drug addicts. In 1974, Short Eyes, a play about the prisoners’ reaction to a child molester, was performed and received critical acclaim from New York’s theater elite. Later, Short Eyes was performed off-Broadway for the public. The play received honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and was nominated for an Obie and Tony in the same year. In addition to his theatrical fame and financial successes, the academic elite also recognized Piñero. For example, he was invited to speak at Princeton, Rutgers and Pratt Institute.
Piñero turned his attention to mentoring young Puerto Rican youth. He turned his apartment into an informal outreach center for at-risk youths. He mentored him in writing and was determined to increase their self-confidence as “Nuyoricans,” or Puerto Ricans living as racialized and impoverished minorities in New York. He also opened a Nuyorican Café and co-created an anthology of Nuyorican poetry. He recruited a group of hustler youths to perform Subculture.
Piñero continued to get into trouble with the law, but now, he was financially able to extricate himself from them.
In 1975, Piñero played the part of God in Steambath by Bruce Jay Friedman in Philadelphia. In the city of brotherly love, Piñero wrote Eulogy for a Small Time Thief, which was played by the N.Y Ensemble Studio Theater off-Broadway. Piñero wrote the screenplay for Short Eyes, which became a film. He also acted in it as a child-molesting drug pusher. Piñero wrote his least recognized play, The Sun Always Shines for the Cool, which was performed by NY’s 78th Street Theatre Lab in 1978. Though Piñero never projected the image of a family man, he married Juanita Lovette Rameize and adopted a son, Ismael Castro with her in 1977 (Rossini 242). Unfortunately, the marriage did not last and they divorced in 1979.
Piñero moved to Los Angeles and created The One Act Theater Festival, which showcased Guntower, Paper Toilet, and Cold Beer. He also began writing for a new medium—television. He wrote two screenplays for Baretta and played an undercover narcotics officer in one episode and also acted in Kojak. He screen roles seem limited to that “characters” he played in real-life, such as a drug dealer in Fort Apache and The Bronx (1980), and as con man in Breathless, Exposed, and Deal of the Century (all 1983), and The Pick-Up Artist (1987).
Poetry was also the writer’s medium for self-expression. Piñero compiled his poems in La Bodega Sold Dreams and published it.
Death: On June 17,1988, Piñero died in New York City. One of his last plays was A Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon (1981), which received mixed reviews from critics. In December 2001, Leon Ichaso made a movie about the writer, entitled Piñero. To many, the film commemorated the lifelong accomplishments of the nation’s most important Puerto Rican American writers.
By Ming
List of Works
All Junkies
The Guntower
Paper Toilet
Straight From The Ghetto
Nuyorican Nights At The Stanton Street Social Club
Payland Blues
Short Eyes
Cold Beer
La Bodega Sold Dreams
The Sun Always Shines For the Cool
Midnight Moon At The Greasy Spoon
Eulogy For A Small Time Thief
Outrageous: One Act Plays
Short Eyes
Summary: A prison drama that explores the racial and sexual dynamics between several inmates—Juan (a Puerto Rican), Cupcakes (a younger Puerto Rican), Paco (Puerto Rican dope addict), Ice (black man), Omar (amateur boxer), El Raheen (black Muslim), Longshoe (white Irishman), and Clark Davis (white male). Other characters include Mr. Nett (white prison guard), Captain Allard (officer of the House of Detention), Mr. Brown (an officer), Sergeant Morrison (officer) and Blanca and Gypsy (transvestites).
The inmates negotiate and argue with one another over access to space and control, and engage in the mundane activities and small rebellions that characterize their existence in a total institution. The flow of their lives is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Clark Davis, a white middle-class man, who is accused of child molestation. As prisoner who is branded a child molester, or short eyes, by the inmates, Davis occupies the most despised position in prison society.
Most of the inmates eventually conspire to kill Davis and are absolved of responsibility because of the prison officers’ complicity. However, they learned that Davis was innocent of those charges. < Piñero, Miguel. Short Eyes. New York: Hill and Wang. 1975>
Production History:
· 1974 Theatre of Riverside Church
· Anspacher Theater
· Zellerbach Theather (Pennsylvania), May 9, 1974Vivial Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.
· Short Eyes was performed off-Broadway for the public.
1975 Published by Hill and Wang, New York
Film:
· Short Eyes: “Jesus Help Me ‘Cause Man Won’t.” (1977); Directed by Robert M. Young. Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews:
· Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. Spirituality and Health: Spiritual Practices for Human Beings. 1980-2003.
Summary: “The ultimate message of the film is that the prison is a microcosm of society's bigotries, preconceived hatreds, and group pressures enforced against undesirable outsiders.”
· Phill Hall. Film Threat: Truth in Entertainment.
http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-1018893/reviews.php?critic=movies&sortby=default&page=1&rid=849095
“Lousy prison drama.”
· Wilson Morales. Black Film.com.
"Based on the award-winning play by Miguel Pinero, and directed by Robert M. Young, the film is well-acted with a frightening view of prison life."
· Joe McGovern. “Tracking Shots.” Village Voice. March 5-11, 2003. < http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0310/tracking.php>
Interview with Filmmakers:
· Morales, Ed. "That Puerto Rican Swing: A Talk With Leon Ichaso and Benjamin Bratt" Village Voice. December 12—18, 2001. < http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0150/morales.php>
Critical Reception:
· 1974 New York Drama critics Circle Award
· 1974 Obie.
Reviews:
· Kerr, Walter “----.” The New York Times. March 27, 1974. Critics saw it as partly documentary because the play employed real prisoners and was based on Piñero’s experiences (Rossini 240).
· Roger S. Platizky. “Human Vision in Miguel Piñero’s Short Eyes.” Americas Review. 19. Spring 1991. p83-91.
· Ariel Ruiz. “Raza, sexo y politica en Short Eyes de Miguel Piñero.” Americas Review. 15. Summer 1987. p93-102.
Original Interpretive Material:
· Rossini, Jon D. “Miguel Piñero.” Texas Tech University. p238-244. Twentieth-century American dramatists. Fourth series. Ed. Christopher J. Wheatley. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 266. Detroit: Gale Group, 2003.
By Ming
Cold Beer
Summary: This one-act play is about an artist named Mike or “beerbelly poet.” The play centers on the strange and defiant ways in which Mike enacts his artistic vision. Mike also meets a variety of people, some real and some not (Jon D. Rossini 243).
Production History:
· Performed in 1979 New York.
· Piñero, Miguel. Outrageous: One Act Plays by Miguel Piñero. Arte Publico Press: 1986.
Critical Reception:
· Play is Piñero’s way of experimenting with a “different way of writing that questions the mainstream and is confrontational but comprehensible” (Rossini 243). The play also works with a nontraditional theater style.
Original Interpretive Material: Rossini, Jon D. Miguel Piñero. Texas Tech University. p238-244. Twentieth-century American dramatists. Fourth series. Ed. Christopher J. Wheatley. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 266. Detroit: Gale Group, 2003.
By Ming
La Bodega Sold Dreams
“Piñero was one of my writing idols. He took Latin street culture and put it into poetry. He documented our spirit. The whole era of Nuyorican poets was an inspiration to me when I was 19 and 20. We're in a pop era now. Everything is fast, easy, downloadable. Back then they took the time to dig in and find great words to say deep things."
-John Leguizamo
Miguel Piñero was more than a playwright and sometime actor: he was also a poet. His sole published book of poems, La Bodega Sold Dreams, contains eighteen works inspired by a hard life in the Lower East Side. These poems present the loathing Piñero felt for the oppressive qualities of his home, equaled only by his love and dedication to that same loathed home, as expressed in poems like “A Lower East Side Poem.”
These poems also express his frustration with racial and ethnic assimilation (“Black Woman with the Blond Wig On”), the singular surreal experience of jail life (“On the Lock In”), and his own dreams, fears, and obstacles (“La Bodega Sold Dreams”).
In the title poem, La Bodega Sold Dreams, Piñero dreams of being a poet who crashes through the barriers and ugliness of “minds weak/ &/ those asleep.” He imagines his poetry being read in bodegas, warehouses, where spoken word poetry was read. However, the twentieth line, a simple “but/” switches gears from dreams to fears as Piñero goes on to say that “sweatin’/ &/ swearin’/ &/ slavin’/ for the final dime/” keeps the poet from the poet’s work. He makes an allusion to traffic lights, “words stoppin’ on red/ goin’ on green/,” the constant struggle to make ends meet leaves no time for dreams. Creativity cannot conform to a nine-to-five schedule, or any schedule at all, as Piñero realizes all too painfully.
Yet that doesn’t seem to stop him from communicating the very moving struggle of the poet.
Piñero uses dialect in his poetry, a better explanation of the rhythm of the language than one could surmise with proper grammar. His poetry has the power of the voices of both his comrades and enemies in the Lower East Side. His work is at once both extremely personal and strangely universal. The experiences of “Cocaine Nose-Acid Face,” “On the Lock In,” “On the Day They Buried My Mother,” are not his alone, yet he shows us the profundity of the effects of these experiences on his mind and heart.
Many of these poems express an intense anger at the world, the world that created the poverty stricken and racially discriminated situation of him and so many others. Some times the anger is expressed in a kind of cynical comedy as in “The Book of Genesis According to San Miguelito,” which is followed by terrifying injustice and vengeance (“-Kill, Kill, Kill”), and completed by the tragic futility of seeking answers and reason in the chaos (“Seeking the Cause”).
On The Lock-In
Piñero uses a non traditional style in presenting this poem. Its lines span three columns across the page. It creates a very disjointed feeling. The lines come in small groups, separate from each other. I tried reading them by column instead of left to right. It seems that you can mix them up. They are the fragments of time spent in prison, waiting. The lines that reference time are in parenthesis: “(lights out),” “(count time),” “(no mail).” These are the moments in between actions. Some lines are actions in the room, such as “I hear the shuffling of cards/.” Piñero uses a play on words in the next section, “brothers playing solitaire/ in the stream of solitude/.” Solitaire, a card game for one, is lost in the stream of solitude that engulfs them there.
He also refers to past memories, “I still think of you/ &/ the brothers voices/ fight a losing battles/.” If read left to right then the line reads “the brothers voices/ hang unused/ in the stream of solitude/ fight a losing battle/.” Some lines can be read both ways to find another layer of meaning. The first reading implies a memory of a battle fought. The latter reading adds that those voices are made impotent from un-use in that same al consuming stream of solitude.
On the Day They Buried My Mother
The poem opens “The wind pushed the sun behind the moon/.” This sets us up to hear unusual experiences recounted. A later line reads, “a deer laid dead on a fresh water stream/ and the hunter cursed/ beneath his breath at the spirits of/ the stars who caused the deer’s death… /.” I ask, did the hunter kill the deer then curse its death? Is Piñero implying that a man may do the damage and try to place the blame elsewhere. Or did the hunter find the deer poisoning the stream with its dead body and then curse the spirits who caused its natural death? Then Piñero may be saying that a man may curse the spirits for a death, though he would have done the act himself. The curse is then made out of inconvenience rather than regret.
Another line says “The earth shook with laughter/ as the spades tickled its sides/.” The spades are for digging which may be related to the digging of his mother’s grave. It seems that the earth is laughing as a grave is dug, laughing at misfortune. Later the poem says “calmly smiled my fears aside…” To smile one’s fear aside is to push them away. This lack of acknowledgement for fear, when left alone in the world after the death of a parent, can be even worse than the fear. He did not smile his fears “away” either, merely aside. This implies a return of those fears.
The Book of Genesis According to San Miguelito
Although a humorous poem, Piñero’s version of the book of genesis is dark and ridden with anger at prejudice pointed at race, the ghettos, and injustice. Piñero uses allusions to the bible to criticize the gaps in Christianity’s explanation of creation. Those gaps include poverty and racism. The poem reads “In the beginning/ God created the ghettos & slums/.”
I can only imagine Piñero asking why things had to be the way they were, why God allowed it. This poem asks if there is a difference between “creating” and “allowing.” Piñero does not think so.
In this poem Piñero tacks God with the responsibility for everything from hepatitis to capitalism. He also personifies God when he says “On the fourth day/ God was riding around Harlem in a gypsy cab/.” Piñero places God in the center of the pain and hunger and poverty, where God cannot deny the sight.
At one point in the poem the people ask “why? WHY? WHY?” God replies
“No . . . . . . . . . .COMMENT!,” an answer commonly given to difficult questions one would rather not take responsibility for.
Finally God faces the problem of Satan who comes to plant “the learning trees of consciousness/ around his ghetto edens/.” God deals with this by telling the people over national T.V., “to be/ COOL/.” This relates this message to media, the broadcasting of an idea over television. We are constantly bombarded with media that encourages us to do everything we can to be anything we are told is “cool.” To what end did Piñero and his brothers go to be cool in a way that hurt them or their loved ones? What did they sacrifice of the trees of learning and consciousness?
By Shannon Davis
Midnight Moon At The Greasy Spoon
Joseph Scott (Joe) owns a diner in the Times Square area of New York. He employs Gerald Fisher (Gerry) and Dominick Fisher. Dominick is a Greek immigrant who gets taken away by the INS and FBI, because the woman he married for a Green Card was not an American citizen. Various characters come in and out of the small shop as we learn that Joe used to be a vaudevillian actor, who never quite made it. We meet Joe the Cop, who is a “decent guy,” and Zulma the wannabe actress who is past her prime but still trying. We also meet Gerry and Joe’s friend, Jake who is a pimp. Zulma eventually gets hired at the diner, and at the end of the play Joe lies dying on the floor of the diner.
Miguel Pinero’s play Midnight Moon At The Greasy Spoon was produced in April 1981 at the Theater for the New City and reviewed by Mel Gussow in April 1981. Gussow called this play a “departure” for Pinero, and a sign that this playwright was expanding his repertoire. Short Eyes dealt with characters that were very much trapped in their situations, whereas Greasy Spoon seems to offer up characters that have a chance of succeeding. It is a great look at the lives of the underclass, and I must disagree with Gussow’s review that the play “pauses awkwardly for speechifying and tries too hard to be up to the minute.” I think that the long speeches, at least in reading the play, are great glimpses into the hopes and dreams of these different characters of the play. Gerry has a long speech, bemoaning the fact that he will probably never see his grown children again because they shipped he and his wife off to a nursing home, where they don’t want to visit him. It is speech that certain embodies the fear of many aging Americans- afraid that they, like Gerry, will become “obsolete.” As for trying too hard to be up to the minute, I think it gives the play a great historical context. Looking back at this script, more than twenty-years later, it is really interesting to note who the major characters of the day were. Lyndon Johnson is mentioned, which is really interesting considering that he was a president who was considered a failure by many people of his generation. But fifteen years after his presidency, Gerry talks about him with the same sort of hopefulness that many of these characters have for their own life.
Generally, I do not enjoy plays that do not contain some sort of plot-moving action. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, comes to mind, as one of the plays that is more about the message than an exciting plot. However, Greasy Spoon is a play in the same vein that is more about the character’s espousing the message than the plot having a hand. This play, did not annoy me like Our Town, though. Perhaps it entertained me because it contained a cast of characters that were very interesting and unique to learn about. All of these characters seemed to have a dream: Joe had wanted to be a star, Dominick just wanted to make a living in America. Even though most of the characters dreams didn’t come true, perhaps Joe said it best when he said “I guess I should thank the Lord for each dream, even if the dream never came true, at least I had the opportunity to have dreams...” I enjoyed this play because we got to see the hopes and aspirations of all different types of people.
By Amy Kathleen Takeuchi
Eulogy for A Small Time Thief
I could not find any record of a production of this play, but it was published in 1984 along with The Sun Always Shines For The Cool and Midnight Moon At The Greasy Spoon. This play centers on David Dancer and Rosemarie Pauls, who are a team of thieves. Rosemarie’s little sister, Nicole is involved in an affair with David, and is pregnant with his child. In order to make some extra cash, Nicole invites her two friends Elaine and Rita over to David and Rosemarie’s apartment to prostitute themselves to men David picked up, Miles and Carlos. Miles turns out to be Elaine’s father. A fight ensues, but eventually Carols, Miles, Rita and Elaine all leave. Rosemarie leaves when she learns of David’s affair, and tells her sister that David will never be successful without Rosemarie, because she is the brain behind the operation. David throws Nicole out when he learns that Rosemarie left because of their affair. Terry, a friend of David’s has come over and David and Terry are left alone in the apartment. Terry has been contracted to kill David and does so at the end of the play.
While this play is full of twists and turns, I am most fascinated by the relationship between Rosemarie and David. Rosemarie has stuck by David throughout the years. She taught him how to hold people up, and planned all of their operations. It was always David who went to jail, because he was the one who actually committed the crimes. Even though at first it seems awful that David would cheat on his longtime girlfriend, one comes to realize that Rosemarie knows how to handle herself. She is able to walk away from the relationship because “he is a sinking ship.” Rosemarie foretells of David’s imminent death. Rosemarie used David as her henchmen throughout the years. Perhaps she knows that Terry was there to kill him, perhaps not. But when David begins to become more of a problem than being of use to her, she does not really hesitate to “lose” him to her little sister. David, on the other hand, knew that he needed Rosemarie around and kicked out Nicole when he realized that she was the reason Rosemarie left. Both David and Rosemarie seemed to stick with one another because they realized that they could not pull of their illegal activities without one another. This relationship was built more on necessity to commit crimes, than a mutual love for one another. Neither seemed terribly upset about losing the other person; only losing what that other person brought for them. In the end, one does not seem terribly upset about David’s death at the end. It happens more as a natural conclusion, rather than as a punishment for anything he has done wrong in his life. He says that today was a day he would not want “somebody to recite over my cuffing during the text of my eulogy.” However, as it turns out, the play does become his eulogy for in the end he was left alone, with no one to give him a funeral.
By Amy Kathleen Takeuchi
Helpful Links
1. www.doollee.com ~ This is a helpful list of his works
2. http://allpoetry.com/Poem/331660 ~ This site links you to a poem about Miguel Piñero, an ode if you will.
3. http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/latinoguide/latino_poets.htm ~ This is a link to a site with a guide of Latino poets and their works.
4. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0934770026/002-7507988-1785667?v=glance ~ This is where you can purchase La Bodega Sold Dreams for only five dollars!
Birth: Miguel Piñero born on Dec. 19 1946 in Gurabo, in east central Puerto Rico. His birth name was Miguel Antonio Gomez Piñero. He was the oldest child of Adelina Piñero and Miguel Angel Gomez Ramos in a family with four children.
Childhood: Since his childhood, Piñero and his family lived in poverty. His family moved to New York City—Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Shortly, his father left the family and Adelina and her children were forced out of her home. They survived on welfare. At school, Piñero was a troubled child. He was transferred to three different schools because of truancy. He learned how to survive in the tough streets as the hip youth, “Mickey.”
Piñero’s early influences included his mother was a novice fiction writer and like his father, loved to tell stories. Piñero also wrote small pieces of fiction during his youth. However, his passion for fiction did not keep him from crime and drugs. In 1961, he was sent to the Otisville Training School for Boys—a reform school for troubled young men. In 1963, he committed his first major crime—burglarizing a jewelry store—and was sentenced to three years at NY prison at Rikers Island.
Young Adult: Piñero finally got out of prison at the age of nineteen. His first hand experience at prison life informed many of his best works. However, prison has also turned him into a heroin addict and an expert at petty crime. Piñero attempted to reform. For a while, he attended a rehabilitation center and joined an anti-drug Puerto Rican gang—the Young Lords. Shortly, he relapsed into drugs and crimes to support his habit. He was sentenced to Rikers for three years for drug possession and later to the Manhattan State Hospital. He was able to earn his high school equivalency certificate in the hospital. Yet, he resorted to drugs and crime after he was released. In 1971, Piñero was sentenced to the New York State Penitentiary at Ossining (Sing Sing).
Career: Prison provided the substance for his writing. When directors Clay Stevenson and Marvin Felix Camillo came to Sing Sing to organize a theater workshop, Piñero enlisted Camillo’s aid as a mentor. Piñero entered his poem, “Black Woman with a Blond Wig on” in a contest and won $50.00. This marked the beginning of the writer’s professional career. Camillo helped Piñero write short plays and skits. The products of the theater workshop, which included many of Piñero’s works, were performed live before inmates, prison officials and The New York Times theater critic, who gave the performance a flattering review. When he was paroled, Piñero joined the Family at the Theatre of Riverside Church—a theater troupe composed of ex-convicts and ex-drug addicts. In 1974, Short Eyes, a play about the prisoners’ reaction to a child molester, was performed and received critical acclaim from New York’s theater elite. Later, Short Eyes was performed off-Broadway for the public. The play received honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and was nominated for an Obie and Tony in the same year. In addition to his theatrical fame and financial successes, the academic elite also recognized Piñero. For example, he was invited to speak at Princeton, Rutgers and Pratt Institute.
Piñero turned his attention to mentoring young Puerto Rican youth. He turned his apartment into an informal outreach center for at-risk youths. He mentored him in writing and was determined to increase their self-confidence as “Nuyoricans,” or Puerto Ricans living as racialized and impoverished minorities in New York. He also opened a Nuyorican Café and co-created an anthology of Nuyorican poetry. He recruited a group of hustler youths to perform Subculture.
Piñero continued to get into trouble with the law, but now, he was financially able to extricate himself from them.
In 1975, Piñero played the part of God in Steambath by Bruce Jay Friedman in Philadelphia. In the city of brotherly love, Piñero wrote Eulogy for a Small Time Thief, which was played by the N.Y Ensemble Studio Theater off-Broadway. Piñero wrote the screenplay for Short Eyes, which became a film. He also acted in it as a child-molesting drug pusher. Piñero wrote his least recognized play, The Sun Always Shines for the Cool, which was performed by NY’s 78th Street Theatre Lab in 1978. Though Piñero never projected the image of a family man, he married Juanita Lovette Rameize and adopted a son, Ismael Castro with her in 1977 (Rossini 242). Unfortunately, the marriage did not last and they divorced in 1979.
Piñero moved to Los Angeles and created The One Act Theater Festival, which showcased Guntower, Paper Toilet, and Cold Beer. He also began writing for a new medium—television. He wrote two screenplays for Baretta and played an undercover narcotics officer in one episode and also acted in Kojak. He screen roles seem limited to that “characters” he played in real-life, such as a drug dealer in Fort Apache and The Bronx (1980), and as con man in Breathless, Exposed, and Deal of the Century (all 1983), and The Pick-Up Artist (1987).
Poetry was also the writer’s medium for self-expression. Piñero compiled his poems in La Bodega Sold Dreams and published it.
Death: On June 17,1988, Piñero died in New York City. One of his last plays was A Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon (1981), which received mixed reviews from critics. In December 2001, Leon Ichaso made a movie about the writer, entitled Piñero. To many, the film commemorated the lifelong accomplishments of the nation’s most important Puerto Rican American writers.
By Ming
List of Works
All Junkies
The Guntower
Paper Toilet
Straight From The Ghetto
Nuyorican Nights At The Stanton Street Social Club
Payland Blues
Short Eyes
Cold Beer
La Bodega Sold Dreams
The Sun Always Shines For the Cool
Midnight Moon At The Greasy Spoon
Eulogy For A Small Time Thief
Outrageous: One Act Plays
Short Eyes
Summary: A prison drama that explores the racial and sexual dynamics between several inmates—Juan (a Puerto Rican), Cupcakes (a younger Puerto Rican), Paco (Puerto Rican dope addict), Ice (black man), Omar (amateur boxer), El Raheen (black Muslim), Longshoe (white Irishman), and Clark Davis (white male). Other characters include Mr. Nett (white prison guard), Captain Allard (officer of the House of Detention), Mr. Brown (an officer), Sergeant Morrison (officer) and Blanca and Gypsy (transvestites).
The inmates negotiate and argue with one another over access to space and control, and engage in the mundane activities and small rebellions that characterize their existence in a total institution. The flow of their lives is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Clark Davis, a white middle-class man, who is accused of child molestation. As prisoner who is branded a child molester, or short eyes, by the inmates, Davis occupies the most despised position in prison society.
Most of the inmates eventually conspire to kill Davis and are absolved of responsibility because of the prison officers’ complicity. However, they learned that Davis was innocent of those charges. < Piñero, Miguel. Short Eyes. New York: Hill and Wang. 1975>
Production History:
· 1974 Theatre of Riverside Church
· Anspacher Theater
· Zellerbach Theather (Pennsylvania), May 9, 1974Vivial Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.
· Short Eyes was performed off-Broadway for the public.
1975 Published by Hill and Wang, New York
Film:
· Short Eyes: “Jesus Help Me ‘Cause Man Won’t.” (1977); Directed by Robert M. Young. Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews:
· Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat. Spirituality and Health: Spiritual Practices for Human Beings. 1980-2003.
Summary: “The ultimate message of the film is that the prison is a microcosm of society's bigotries, preconceived hatreds, and group pressures enforced against undesirable outsiders.”
· Phill Hall. Film Threat: Truth in Entertainment.
http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-1018893/reviews.php?critic=movies&sortby=default&page=1&rid=849095
“Lousy prison drama.”
· Wilson Morales. Black Film.com.
"Based on the award-winning play by Miguel Pinero, and directed by Robert M. Young, the film is well-acted with a frightening view of prison life."
· Joe McGovern. “Tracking Shots.” Village Voice. March 5-11, 2003. < http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0310/tracking.php>
Interview with Filmmakers:
· Morales, Ed. "That Puerto Rican Swing: A Talk With Leon Ichaso and Benjamin Bratt" Village Voice. December 12—18, 2001. < http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0150/morales.php>
Critical Reception:
· 1974 New York Drama critics Circle Award
· 1974 Obie.
Reviews:
· Kerr, Walter “----.” The New York Times. March 27, 1974. Critics saw it as partly documentary because the play employed real prisoners and was based on Piñero’s experiences (Rossini 240).
· Roger S. Platizky. “Human Vision in Miguel Piñero’s Short Eyes.” Americas Review. 19. Spring 1991. p83-91.
· Ariel Ruiz. “Raza, sexo y politica en Short Eyes de Miguel Piñero.” Americas Review. 15. Summer 1987. p93-102.
Original Interpretive Material:
· Rossini, Jon D. “Miguel Piñero.” Texas Tech University. p238-244. Twentieth-century American dramatists. Fourth series. Ed. Christopher J. Wheatley. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 266. Detroit: Gale Group, 2003.
By Ming
Cold Beer
Summary: This one-act play is about an artist named Mike or “beerbelly poet.” The play centers on the strange and defiant ways in which Mike enacts his artistic vision. Mike also meets a variety of people, some real and some not (Jon D. Rossini 243).
Production History:
· Performed in 1979 New York.
· Piñero, Miguel. Outrageous: One Act Plays by Miguel Piñero. Arte Publico Press: 1986.
Critical Reception:
· Play is Piñero’s way of experimenting with a “different way of writing that questions the mainstream and is confrontational but comprehensible” (Rossini 243). The play also works with a nontraditional theater style.
Original Interpretive Material: Rossini, Jon D. Miguel Piñero. Texas Tech University. p238-244. Twentieth-century American dramatists. Fourth series. Ed. Christopher J. Wheatley. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 266. Detroit: Gale Group, 2003.
By Ming
La Bodega Sold Dreams
“Piñero was one of my writing idols. He took Latin street culture and put it into poetry. He documented our spirit. The whole era of Nuyorican poets was an inspiration to me when I was 19 and 20. We're in a pop era now. Everything is fast, easy, downloadable. Back then they took the time to dig in and find great words to say deep things."
-John Leguizamo
Miguel Piñero was more than a playwright and sometime actor: he was also a poet. His sole published book of poems, La Bodega Sold Dreams, contains eighteen works inspired by a hard life in the Lower East Side. These poems present the loathing Piñero felt for the oppressive qualities of his home, equaled only by his love and dedication to that same loathed home, as expressed in poems like “A Lower East Side Poem.”
These poems also express his frustration with racial and ethnic assimilation (“Black Woman with the Blond Wig On”), the singular surreal experience of jail life (“On the Lock In”), and his own dreams, fears, and obstacles (“La Bodega Sold Dreams”).
In the title poem, La Bodega Sold Dreams, Piñero dreams of being a poet who crashes through the barriers and ugliness of “minds weak/ &/ those asleep.” He imagines his poetry being read in bodegas, warehouses, where spoken word poetry was read. However, the twentieth line, a simple “but/” switches gears from dreams to fears as Piñero goes on to say that “sweatin’/ &/ swearin’/ &/ slavin’/ for the final dime/” keeps the poet from the poet’s work. He makes an allusion to traffic lights, “words stoppin’ on red/ goin’ on green/,” the constant struggle to make ends meet leaves no time for dreams. Creativity cannot conform to a nine-to-five schedule, or any schedule at all, as Piñero realizes all too painfully.
Yet that doesn’t seem to stop him from communicating the very moving struggle of the poet.
Piñero uses dialect in his poetry, a better explanation of the rhythm of the language than one could surmise with proper grammar. His poetry has the power of the voices of both his comrades and enemies in the Lower East Side. His work is at once both extremely personal and strangely universal. The experiences of “Cocaine Nose-Acid Face,” “On the Lock In,” “On the Day They Buried My Mother,” are not his alone, yet he shows us the profundity of the effects of these experiences on his mind and heart.
Many of these poems express an intense anger at the world, the world that created the poverty stricken and racially discriminated situation of him and so many others. Some times the anger is expressed in a kind of cynical comedy as in “The Book of Genesis According to San Miguelito,” which is followed by terrifying injustice and vengeance (“-Kill, Kill, Kill”), and completed by the tragic futility of seeking answers and reason in the chaos (“Seeking the Cause”).
On The Lock-In
Piñero uses a non traditional style in presenting this poem. Its lines span three columns across the page. It creates a very disjointed feeling. The lines come in small groups, separate from each other. I tried reading them by column instead of left to right. It seems that you can mix them up. They are the fragments of time spent in prison, waiting. The lines that reference time are in parenthesis: “(lights out),” “(count time),” “(no mail).” These are the moments in between actions. Some lines are actions in the room, such as “I hear the shuffling of cards/.” Piñero uses a play on words in the next section, “brothers playing solitaire/ in the stream of solitude/.” Solitaire, a card game for one, is lost in the stream of solitude that engulfs them there.
He also refers to past memories, “I still think of you/ &/ the brothers voices/ fight a losing battles/.” If read left to right then the line reads “the brothers voices/ hang unused/ in the stream of solitude/ fight a losing battle/.” Some lines can be read both ways to find another layer of meaning. The first reading implies a memory of a battle fought. The latter reading adds that those voices are made impotent from un-use in that same al consuming stream of solitude.
On the Day They Buried My Mother
The poem opens “The wind pushed the sun behind the moon/.” This sets us up to hear unusual experiences recounted. A later line reads, “a deer laid dead on a fresh water stream/ and the hunter cursed/ beneath his breath at the spirits of/ the stars who caused the deer’s death… /.” I ask, did the hunter kill the deer then curse its death? Is Piñero implying that a man may do the damage and try to place the blame elsewhere. Or did the hunter find the deer poisoning the stream with its dead body and then curse the spirits who caused its natural death? Then Piñero may be saying that a man may curse the spirits for a death, though he would have done the act himself. The curse is then made out of inconvenience rather than regret.
Another line says “The earth shook with laughter/ as the spades tickled its sides/.” The spades are for digging which may be related to the digging of his mother’s grave. It seems that the earth is laughing as a grave is dug, laughing at misfortune. Later the poem says “calmly smiled my fears aside…” To smile one’s fear aside is to push them away. This lack of acknowledgement for fear, when left alone in the world after the death of a parent, can be even worse than the fear. He did not smile his fears “away” either, merely aside. This implies a return of those fears.
The Book of Genesis According to San Miguelito
Although a humorous poem, Piñero’s version of the book of genesis is dark and ridden with anger at prejudice pointed at race, the ghettos, and injustice. Piñero uses allusions to the bible to criticize the gaps in Christianity’s explanation of creation. Those gaps include poverty and racism. The poem reads “In the beginning/ God created the ghettos & slums/.”
I can only imagine Piñero asking why things had to be the way they were, why God allowed it. This poem asks if there is a difference between “creating” and “allowing.” Piñero does not think so.
In this poem Piñero tacks God with the responsibility for everything from hepatitis to capitalism. He also personifies God when he says “On the fourth day/ God was riding around Harlem in a gypsy cab/.” Piñero places God in the center of the pain and hunger and poverty, where God cannot deny the sight.
At one point in the poem the people ask “why? WHY? WHY?” God replies
“No . . . . . . . . . .COMMENT!,” an answer commonly given to difficult questions one would rather not take responsibility for.
Finally God faces the problem of Satan who comes to plant “the learning trees of consciousness/ around his ghetto edens/.” God deals with this by telling the people over national T.V., “to be/ COOL/.” This relates this message to media, the broadcasting of an idea over television. We are constantly bombarded with media that encourages us to do everything we can to be anything we are told is “cool.” To what end did Piñero and his brothers go to be cool in a way that hurt them or their loved ones? What did they sacrifice of the trees of learning and consciousness?
By Shannon Davis
Midnight Moon At The Greasy Spoon
Joseph Scott (Joe) owns a diner in the Times Square area of New York. He employs Gerald Fisher (Gerry) and Dominick Fisher. Dominick is a Greek immigrant who gets taken away by the INS and FBI, because the woman he married for a Green Card was not an American citizen. Various characters come in and out of the small shop as we learn that Joe used to be a vaudevillian actor, who never quite made it. We meet Joe the Cop, who is a “decent guy,” and Zulma the wannabe actress who is past her prime but still trying. We also meet Gerry and Joe’s friend, Jake who is a pimp. Zulma eventually gets hired at the diner, and at the end of the play Joe lies dying on the floor of the diner.
Miguel Pinero’s play Midnight Moon At The Greasy Spoon was produced in April 1981 at the Theater for the New City and reviewed by Mel Gussow in April 1981. Gussow called this play a “departure” for Pinero, and a sign that this playwright was expanding his repertoire. Short Eyes dealt with characters that were very much trapped in their situations, whereas Greasy Spoon seems to offer up characters that have a chance of succeeding. It is a great look at the lives of the underclass, and I must disagree with Gussow’s review that the play “pauses awkwardly for speechifying and tries too hard to be up to the minute.” I think that the long speeches, at least in reading the play, are great glimpses into the hopes and dreams of these different characters of the play. Gerry has a long speech, bemoaning the fact that he will probably never see his grown children again because they shipped he and his wife off to a nursing home, where they don’t want to visit him. It is speech that certain embodies the fear of many aging Americans- afraid that they, like Gerry, will become “obsolete.” As for trying too hard to be up to the minute, I think it gives the play a great historical context. Looking back at this script, more than twenty-years later, it is really interesting to note who the major characters of the day were. Lyndon Johnson is mentioned, which is really interesting considering that he was a president who was considered a failure by many people of his generation. But fifteen years after his presidency, Gerry talks about him with the same sort of hopefulness that many of these characters have for their own life.
Generally, I do not enjoy plays that do not contain some sort of plot-moving action. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, comes to mind, as one of the plays that is more about the message than an exciting plot. However, Greasy Spoon is a play in the same vein that is more about the character’s espousing the message than the plot having a hand. This play, did not annoy me like Our Town, though. Perhaps it entertained me because it contained a cast of characters that were very interesting and unique to learn about. All of these characters seemed to have a dream: Joe had wanted to be a star, Dominick just wanted to make a living in America. Even though most of the characters dreams didn’t come true, perhaps Joe said it best when he said “I guess I should thank the Lord for each dream, even if the dream never came true, at least I had the opportunity to have dreams...” I enjoyed this play because we got to see the hopes and aspirations of all different types of people.
By Amy Kathleen Takeuchi
Eulogy for A Small Time Thief
I could not find any record of a production of this play, but it was published in 1984 along with The Sun Always Shines For The Cool and Midnight Moon At The Greasy Spoon. This play centers on David Dancer and Rosemarie Pauls, who are a team of thieves. Rosemarie’s little sister, Nicole is involved in an affair with David, and is pregnant with his child. In order to make some extra cash, Nicole invites her two friends Elaine and Rita over to David and Rosemarie’s apartment to prostitute themselves to men David picked up, Miles and Carlos. Miles turns out to be Elaine’s father. A fight ensues, but eventually Carols, Miles, Rita and Elaine all leave. Rosemarie leaves when she learns of David’s affair, and tells her sister that David will never be successful without Rosemarie, because she is the brain behind the operation. David throws Nicole out when he learns that Rosemarie left because of their affair. Terry, a friend of David’s has come over and David and Terry are left alone in the apartment. Terry has been contracted to kill David and does so at the end of the play.
While this play is full of twists and turns, I am most fascinated by the relationship between Rosemarie and David. Rosemarie has stuck by David throughout the years. She taught him how to hold people up, and planned all of their operations. It was always David who went to jail, because he was the one who actually committed the crimes. Even though at first it seems awful that David would cheat on his longtime girlfriend, one comes to realize that Rosemarie knows how to handle herself. She is able to walk away from the relationship because “he is a sinking ship.” Rosemarie foretells of David’s imminent death. Rosemarie used David as her henchmen throughout the years. Perhaps she knows that Terry was there to kill him, perhaps not. But when David begins to become more of a problem than being of use to her, she does not really hesitate to “lose” him to her little sister. David, on the other hand, knew that he needed Rosemarie around and kicked out Nicole when he realized that she was the reason Rosemarie left. Both David and Rosemarie seemed to stick with one another because they realized that they could not pull of their illegal activities without one another. This relationship was built more on necessity to commit crimes, than a mutual love for one another. Neither seemed terribly upset about losing the other person; only losing what that other person brought for them. In the end, one does not seem terribly upset about David’s death at the end. It happens more as a natural conclusion, rather than as a punishment for anything he has done wrong in his life. He says that today was a day he would not want “somebody to recite over my cuffing during the text of my eulogy.” However, as it turns out, the play does become his eulogy for in the end he was left alone, with no one to give him a funeral.
By Amy Kathleen Takeuchi
Helpful Links
1. www.doollee.com ~ This is a helpful list of his works
2. http://allpoetry.com/Poem/331660 ~ This site links you to a poem about Miguel Piñero, an ode if you will.
3. http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/latinoguide/latino_poets.htm ~ This is a link to a site with a guide of Latino poets and their works.
4. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0934770026/002-7507988-1785667?v=glance ~ This is where you can purchase La Bodega Sold Dreams for only five dollars!
