OBITUARIES : Miguel Pinero, 41; Ex-Convict and Playwright

Miguel Pinero, the one-time convict whose cell block experiences became the basis of the highly acclaimed play “Short Eyes” has died in a Manhattan hospital, the New York Public Theater announced Friday. He was 41.

Pinero died Thursday of cirrhosis of the liver, said Reva Cooper, a theater spokeswoman.

The first draft of “Short Eyes,” Pinero’s most famous play, was written while the author was still in prison, Cooper said. It is set in the day room of a cell block and involves how other prisoners deal with a new inmate charged with the molestation of a young girl. He is the “short eyes” of the play who is eventually murdered.

The play opened in 1974 at the off-Broadway Riverside Theater as a part of the Third World Project, moved to the Public Theater and then to the Vivian Beaumont Theater in the Lincoln Center and won the coveted New York Drama Critics Award for best American play of the season.

At the time of his death, Pinero was writing another play for the Public Theater, “Every Form of Refuge Has Its Price,” Cooper said. The play takes place in the intensive-care unit of a Manhattan hospital, very similar to the one where he died, said Joseph Papp, head of the New York Public Theater.

“Pinero was the first major writer to come out of the large numbers of Puerto Ricans that came to New York in the ‘50s,” Papp said.

In a reference to the violent, striking play that cemented Pinero’s reputation, Papp said that Pinero “brought a hard-hitting realism to the stage that shook it up.”

Pinero’s other plays include “The Sun Always Shines for the Cool” and “Eulogy for a Small Time Thief.” Pinero also worked as an actor, playing God in “Steambath” in Philadelphia in 1975 and in such films as “The Jericho Mile” in 1979 and “Fort Apache the Bronx” in 1981.

Pinero was born in Gurabo, Puerto Rico, and his family moved to New York when he was 4. A few years later his father abandoned the family and “we were thrown out to the street when I was 9 or 10,” the author said in an interview.

As a young man, Pinero was in and out of jail several times, convicted of armed robbery and other charges, began to use drugs and was sent finally to Sing Sing, where he stumbled onto the prison playwright’s workshop and started writing “Short Eyes.”