Drama:
Worms, pr. 1981
Rosario and the Gypsies, pr. 1982 (one-act musical; book and lyrics; music by Rick Vartoreila)
The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, pr., pb. 1983
There’s Still Time to Dance in the Streets of Rio, pr. 1983
Broken Eggs, pr., pb. 1984
Fabiola, pr. 1985
When It’s Over, pr. 1987 (with Geraldine Sherman)
Why to Refuse, pr. 1987 (one act)
Across a Crowded Room, pr. 1988
A Burning Beach, pr. 1988
Don Juan in New York City, pr. 1988 (two-act musical)
Once Removed, pr., pb. 1988, revised pr. 1994
Wishing You Well, pr. 1988 (one-act musical)
Cabaret Bambu, pr. 1989 (one-act musical)
Related Retreats, pr. 1990
Stevie Wants to Play the Blues, pr. 1990, revised pr. 1998 (two-act musical)
In the Eye of the Hurricane, pr., pb. 1991
The Floating Island Plays, pb. 1991 (as Floating Islands; includes The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, In the Eye of the Hurricane, and Broken Eggs)
1979, pr. 1991
Breathing It In, pr. 1993
The Floating Islands pr. 1994 (as a cycle of 4 plays)
Three Ways to Go Blind, pr. 1994
Between the Sheets, pr. 1996 (music by Mike Nolan and Scott Williams)
Cuba and the Night, pr. 1997
Crocodile Eyes, pr. 1999
Havana Is Waiting, pr. 2001 (originally pr. 2001 as When the Sea Drowns in Sand)
Screenplay:
Exiles in New York, 1999
Translation:
The Day You’ll Love Me, pr. 1989 (of José Ignacio Cabrujas’s play El d’a que me quieras)
Eduardo Machado (mah-CHAH-doh) arrived from Cuba in 1961, at age eight, with his brother Jesús, five years younger, as a “Peter Pan” child. The Peter Pan project, a collaboration between a United States-based Roman Catholic bishop and the United States Central Intelligence Agency, brought fourteen thousand Cuban children to the United States without their parents, ostensibly to “save” them from communism and from the governmental policies under Fidel Castro. Arriving with no knowledge of English and undergoing major culture shock, the brothers were sent to an aunt and uncle in Hialeah, Florida, who had their own children as well as other immigrant relatives living with them. Machado’s first memory of the United States is celebrating Halloween by trick-or-treating, believing that they had been sent out truly begging, as the children had moved from an economically privileged childhood in Cuba to poverty in the United States. His parents came a year later.
The house in which Machado had lived in Cuba was taken by the government and transformed into a school. His father, a self-professed “professional rich man’s son,” initially could not find work in United States. Machado finished growing up in Canoga Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. By the time Machado was sixteen, his father had succeeded economically as an accountant. Machado’s parents later divorced, reportedly due to his father’s infidelity, which has been an item in his dramatic work.
Machado began his acting career in 1978 at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, where he met María Irene Fornés, a Cuban immigrant playwright who would become a major influence on his work. He became her assistant on her Fefu and Her Friends (1977) at the Ensemble Studio Theater. Machado began writing plays at the suggestion of a therapist, who recommended writing an imaginary letter forgiving his mother for sending him away.
By 2002, Machado had written twenty-seven plays, all but seven dealing with his family or Cuba in some way. In New York City, as part of INTAR (International Arts Relations) Hispanic American Arts Center, he wrote The Floating Island Plays (The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, Broken Eggs, In the Eye of the Hurricane) between 1983 and 1991. He has been commissioned to write plays for The Public Theater, the Roundabout Theatre Company, and Wind Dancer Productions. He took his first trip back to Cuba in December, 1999, followed in rapid succession by two more visits to his homeland. Machado says he has always been at the mercy of politics. Critics say his works show his conflicts: capitalism versus communism, heterosexuality versus homosexuality, Cuban identity versus Cuban American identity.
Machado has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, the Mark Taper Forum, The Public Theater, and the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. He has headed Columbia University’s graduate playwriting program in the School of Arts since 1997 and has been an artistic associate of the Cherry Lane Alternative, the Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre’s nonprofit wing.
Machado received a 1995 National Theater Artist Residency to be playwright in residence at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the City of Los Angeles for his works. He received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a one-act play at Ensemble Studio Theatre. He first debuted When the Sea Drowns in Sand at the twenty-fifth annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. It has since been rewritten and performed as the autobiographical Havana Is Waiting.