Haitian American actor Nixon Cesar has joined the cast of the upcoming stage production of Arthur Miller’s The Hook, which will be produced in Red Hook, Brooklyn by the Brave New World Repertory Theatre in June.
The Hook is playwright Ron Hutchinson’s stage adaptation of an unproduced screenplay of the same name written by Miller in 1947 and retrieved from among his manuscripts after his death. Set on the ship docks of Red Hook, the play examines the life and death struggle for survival on the waterfront, where the ever-present danger to the workers and their families comes both from the job itself and the mafia gangsters who control the docks.
In an inspired site specific staging, the production – directed by Brave New World Artistic Director Claire Beckman- will utilize the gangway and the barge of The Waterfront Museum moored in Red Hook as the stage. Production notes state that Beckman hopes the immersive setting will viscerally capture the fight for human dignity that is the central theme of the play.
Cesar signed on to the project earlier in February and will play the role of Enzo, a Haiti-born longshoreman who immigrates to the United States with his wife Loretta (Celeste Muniz) and family in search of a better life, only to then encounter racism and rife corruption on the piers. For the Brooklyn-based actor, who was himself born in Haiti and immigrated to the USA at age two, his participation in the much-anticipated production represents a full circle moment.
As Cesar puts it, “My father Gerald Cesar came to the United States from Haiti in the late 1960s to work as an underwater welder at the Brooklyn Navy Ship Yard. He was one of only two Black men who worked there at the time. Like the character I play in The Hook, my father also came to this country determined to improve the lives and the future of his family. He used to take me to the docks with him sometimes when I was a little boy and show me what he did and how things worked. So the fact that I now get to be part of this story, living through many of the experiences my dad would have had, feels kind of surreal.”
Cesar also pays tribute to Brave New World Artistic Director Beckman, who took the artistic decision to cast Cesar’s character Enzo as a man of color and a Caribbean immigrant.
“In the original script all the dock workers are Irish or Italian,” Cesar says, “But Claire felt this production needed to reflect the full, multicultural humanity of the immigrants who would have been on the waterfront at the time.”
Cesar studied acting at The Lee Strasberg Institute and began his career in theater, making his Off-Broadway debut in the romantic comedy Love and Marriage and New York City.
