Perspectives / José Rivera A prolific playwright and screenwriters, José Rivera's credits include The Motorcycle Diaries, The House of Ramon Iglesia, Cloud Tectonics and Marisol. He has won two Obie Awards for playwriting and is the first Puerto Rican to be nominated for the "Best Adapted Screenplay" Academy Award. It came at the perfect time. I had been writing plays professionally since 1983. The world premiere of The House of Ramon Iglesia at the Ensemble Studio Theatre changed my life forever. Passionate about writing, idealistic about art, and completely naïve about everything else, I knew this was what I wanted. What could be better? Where else could you find a truer, crazier, lovelier community? But in the early 1990s I was dividing my time writing plays and television. TV has its own amazing rewards and in the theatre I had written a couple of critical failures and my new play Marisol seemed to be languishing on the desks of various literary managers and I had just co-created an NBC series called Eerie, Indiana. One road seemed clear and abundantly rewarding, the other was overcast, doubtful. Then the unexpected happened. A call from Jon Jory. A production of Marisol at the Humana Festival. (I wasn’t even aware that my agent had submitted it!) Jon called it “Alice in catastrophe land,” and I was paired up with the brilliant and difficult Marcus Stern and the subsequent production was one of the most pungent and moving (of anything) I had ever seen. You couldn’t get a ticket. Except for the religious press, journalists spoke of it well. And I felt like a playwright again. Jon Jory and Michael Dixon came to my side at the perfect moment and kept me doing what I love to do, which I do now without looking over my shoulder, this lonely, intense, fragile, and lifelong work.