Jose Rivera

1992 Winner in
Drama

José Rivera is an award-winning screenwriter and playwright whose plays—The House of Ramon Iglesia, Slaughter in the Lake, Flowers, The Promise, Each Day Dies with Sleep, Tape, Cloud Tectonics, Sueño, Marisol, References to Salvador Dalí Make me Hot, Sonnets for an Old Century, Brainpeople, School of the Americas, Maricela de la Luz Lights the World, Adoration of the Old Woman, The Street of the Sun, Gliese 581D, Yellow, Human Emotional Process, Pablo and Andrew at the Altar of Words and Giants Have Us in Their Books, Boleros for the Dienchanted, and Masscare (SIng To Your Children)—have premiered off-Broadway and have been seen at major theaters across the country as well as in France, England, Romania, Peru, Mexico, Greece, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Scotland and Canada. His most recent film credit is the adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, directed by Walter Salles. He was nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Writers Guild of America Award and Spain’s Goya Award for his first produced screenplay, The Motorcycle Diaries, also directed by Walter Salles. His film Trade was the first film to premiere at the United Nations. Other screenplays include John Brown, Face Value, Celestina, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, Letters to Juliet, Phailan, and the television series Eerie, Indiana, which he co-created. Rivera has received two OBIE Awards for Playwriting, a McKnight Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Fulbright Arts Fellowship and a Kennedy Center Grant. He studied with Gabriel García Márquez at the Sundance Institute and was writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre, London. He is at work on his first novel, Love Makes the City Crumble.

Photo Credit:
Lela Edgar
Reviews & Praise

“José Rivera is too fine a playwright to pen an uncomplicated story. Ideally, personal plays, such as Boleros for the Disenchanted, set you off thinking about your own marriage, your own parents, your own mortality. So it goes here. Even if you've never seen Puerto Rico or grown old, you sit there ruminating on love, sacrifice and betrayal, and you wonder about what life might yet throw at you and yours. Fans of Rivera will recognize his linguistic flourishes, the stylistic ease, the gaping heart.” —Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

“ . . . [in] Cloud Tectonics, José Rivera's often enchanting new play . . . Rivera has successfully mixed two styles in which he previously dabbled, realism and magic realism, to produce a naturalistic play interlaced with symbols and magical occurrences. In doing so, he has found a voice to probe the mystery of the kind of love that stops your heart as surely as it does your sense of time and space. And he does it without goo.” —Laurie Winer, Los Angeles Times

“The writing fluctuates between faintly surreal poetry and wryly pointed prose, cocky fantasy and bittersweet earthiness. Rivera manages the latter adroitly, but even the former is not without its moments . . . a genuine comedy-drama that rises above the specific into the ecumenical.” —John Simon, New York [on References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot]

Selected Works

The Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona
Premiered in
2018
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Outside Links
IMDB Page
Interview (La Respuesta)