True grit: actor-playwright Ruben Santiago-Hudson sticks to his guns--and lands on Broadway and HBO.(Interview)

American Theatre, February, 2005 by Miller, Stuart

THE PHONE CALL CAME JUST DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, but beneath the wrapping was a gift Ruben Santiago-Hudson could not accept.

"I have good news and bad news," his manager told him.

The young actor had only recently arrived in New York, "a country boy" walking around in awe--as Santiago-Hudson recalls two decades later, during an interview over dinner at the Fairway Cafe, where he knows the owner and staff, not far from his Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. The son of a Puerto Rican father and African-American mother, Ruben Santiago had already been turned down by the two theatre companies he was most eager to work with: The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater couldn't use him because he didn't speak Spanish, and he failed even to get his foot in the...

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