Vita Morales

Vita Patrick Morales is an educator and playwright.  She has a BA in Italian Literature from Rutgers University, an MA in Theater and Film from Hunter College and an MS in Bilingual Education from Fordham University.   She has written 15 plays, some of which have been staged in New York City.  In 1988, Her play Francis of Assisi won the Dean’s Prize for the best Masters thesis in the Humanities and the Arts at Hunter where she was a four-time recipient of the John Golden Award for Playwriting.   Her one-act play, All God’s Children, was produced several times in New York and has won several awards.  She was the coordinator of the A&O Theater Company’s Childrens Division in Manhattan.  She was a member of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater’s Professional Playwrights Unit until moving to New Jersey in 1999.  She is currently developing a full-length script, The Diagonal Trilogy, with the help of the Playwrights Theater of New Jersey.  She is a reader for the Women Playwrights Competition at the Centenary Stage Company and serves as CSC’s volunteer coordinator.

Other Works

Plays

Peccatum Patris

The Final Tolling of the Bells

All God’s Children

Michael, LD

Francis of Assisi

The Gift

Shared Music

The Wall

The Diagonal Trilogy

Esmeralda and the Pacific Vortex

I Prefer Milk

Mario Brown

The libretto for La Befana, music by John Colligan

The King of Kerry

The Holy Cross Passion

Project Description

The Cuban Orthodoxy is a family-inspired story about a young man and his sister and their involvement in the Cuban Revolution.  My husband’s family was caught up in the turmoil of the revolution and many of his uncles became victims of both sides of the unrest.  His mother’s family was involved with the insurgents led by the Castro brothers, Cienfuegos and Guevara and his father was in the army under the control of Batista.  My initial idea was to tell one of his uncles’ story in a stage play.  The story is too big and too convoluted for a manageable play so I had to rescript it to fit the stage.  The play will feature a brother and sister who initially want nothing to do with the movement.  After the suicide of Eduardo Chibás, however, on air, on a weekly radio broadcast, the brother decides to become involved with the Orthodox party.  The Orthodox party, formed by Chibás with the purpose of exposing government corruption and the misappropriation of government funds, was the incubator for Castro and his cohorts and for the play’s characters as well.  The play follows these two young people as they venture into very dangerous situations that lead to prison and exile.