Break Out the Cigars

By Richard Zoglin

A theatergoer in Princeton, N.J., buttonholed an usher during the intermission of the play Anna in the Tropics a few weeks ago. Her complaint: too much cigar smoking onstage. The usher patiently explained that the play is, after all, set in a cigar factory--a family-owned plant in Tampa, Fla., in 1929, where the Cuban-American workers have just hired a new "lector" to read novels to them while they work. Cigar smoke, however, is only one of the sweet and strange aromas that waft from Anna in the Tropics. Written in the lyrical, somewhat formalized language of a folktale, the play is both a slice of cultural history (such lectors, paid for by the workers, were common in Cuban-American factories until the early 1930s, when the owners banned them as subversive influences) and a warm-spirited tribute to the transformative power of art--in this case, the novel chosen by the lector, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

For artistic transformations, one need look no further than the play's author, Nilo Cruz. The Cuban-American playwright labored in the regional-theater vineyards for years with little recognition. Then last spring, Anna in the Tropics--after a single production at a small theater in Coral Gables, Fla.--was the surprise winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Now the play is a hot property, with three simultaneous stagings at regional theaters this fall, one of which--the McCarter Theatre's at Princeton, with Jimmy Smits playing the lector--is transferring to Broadway next month. Another of Cruz's plays, Lorca in a Green Dress, is being staged in Oregon. His Two Sisters and a Piano, about a pair of Cuban political prisoners under house arrest, will be produced next year in San Diego and London, and he's finishing up a play, Huracan, for Washington's Arena Stage about how a hurricane changes the lives of the inhabitants of an unnamed Caribbean island.

Cruz, 43, spent his first nine years in Cuba as one of three children of anti-Castro parents who lived a "dual reality." He says, "We were pretending we were communists, but we were against the system." His father, who sold milk containers, bought meat on the black market for the family dinner table, and Nilo's mother got a doctor friend to say the boy had hepatitis, which allowed him to be sent home from school at lunch so she could feed him better. A childhood filled with faux illnesses "meant I couldn't play and run around the neighborhood," he recalls. "That forced me to stay indoors a lot."

The family fled Cuba in 1970 for Miami, where Cruz spent more time indoors--shelving books at the library and discovering the poetry of Emily Dickinson, along with the work of Latin-American masters like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He acknowledges feeling a responsibility to give theatrical voice to the Latin-American experience in a country where such voices are not often widely heard. But he hopes that plays like Anna in the Tropics will speak to a broader audience. "It deals with large issues, lost traditions, the importance of art--and it's a classic love story. I feel my characters are residents of the universe," he says. Their creator, for certain, is a resident of America to watch. --By Richard Zoglin. With reporting by Amy Lennard Goehner

With reporting by Amy Lennard Goehner