September 11-17, 2003

art

Tropical Equation

Roll call: Roberto Rodriguez (far right) demonstrates the art of cigar rolling to the cast and crew of Anna In the Tropics, including director Emily Mann (far left), star Jimmy Smits (third from left), and playwright Nilo Cruz (next to Rodriguez, in hat).

Tolstoy, spells and cigar rolling: Nilo Cruz's recipe for the Pulitzer, opening this week in Princeton.

by Toby Zinman

When this yearís Pulitzer Prize for drama was announced, there were a lot of puzzled people out there in theaterland. The winner was Nilo Cruz.

Who?

Born in Cuba, raised in Miami and currently living in New York, 42-year-old Cruz (his name is pronounced "Nee-low Cruise") is the first Latino playwright to win the Pulitzer, beating out this year's very major contenders: Edward Albee for The Goat and Richard Greenberg for Take Me Out. Jaws dropped. And considering that the honored play, Anna in the Tropics, had never been performed in New York, the puzzlement was understandably immense. That's about to end.

Next week McCarter Theatre in Princeton, one of the nation's most admired regional theaters, will premiere Anna -- a production likely to move to Broadway after its six-week run. Its starry cast includes Jimmy Smits (former star of TV's NYPD Blue and star of last summer's Shakespeare in the Park's Twelfth Night, among much else), John Ortiz (nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Jesus Hopped the A Train), Daphne Rubin-Vega (original cast of Rent), Priscilla Lopez (Tony winner) and David Zayas (from the recent off-Broadway hit, Our Lady of 121st Street). Emily Mann directs.

The title alone is delicious, once you know that the Anna in question is Anna Karenina. If the play has a central character, it is Tolstoy's novel, Cruz has said. The plot takes its point of departure from historical fact; in the 1920s, in the Cuban section of Tampa, Fla., there were factories where cigars were made by hand. To educate and entertain themselves, the cigar rollers hired men to read to them while they worked. The lector is the role taken by Jimmy Smits (the script specifies that he arrives in a white linen suit with a Panama hat; now doesn't that sound fine?). He chooses to read Anna Karenina, the tragic 19th-century novel about a married woman who catastrophically falls in love with a romantic seducer, Count Vronsky, and ultimately abandons her strait-laced husband and their child; the book begins with one of the most famous opening lines in world literature: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Cruz's dialogue is very lush and full of idiosyncratic charm; the tropical world he creates for this play evokes a past of cockfights and gardenias, filled with characters like one who sings Neapolitan love songs at the end of the workday, another who is "a sea of tears" when she listens to the stories and another who is "a nostalgic at heart" and longs to return to his native Grenada and die. These dramatic characters listen to the novel and their lives intertwine with the lives of the fictional characters; as one character says, "Literature brings out the best and worst in ourselves."

When I spoke to Cruz on the phone, I confessed that I had been so enchanted with the script that I had decided not to read to the end, wanting to save the surprise for seeing it onstage. I did, however, get far enough into it to ask him about the spells; early in the play, one character writes a name on a piece of paper and drops it into water sweetened with brown sugar and cinnamon to conjure up the lector. It works. I asked the playwright about spell-casting and he told me that it was part of Cuban culture as it is influenced by Santeria(a religion derived from the African Yoruba). "It is part of a world I know -- as I live it and as I want to embellish it." I suggested to him that the spell was like the effect the novel has on the factory workers, altering their lives (as any great work of art might change the life of a reader), especially since the magic depended on words written on paper, as if Tolstoy's novel were a giant spell.

I could hear the bemused surprise in his voice as it was his turn to confess that he'd never thought of it that way, never made that conscious connection. But, yes, he agreed, "words have a certain enchantment" and "that should be the function of art." And, defining the creative act perfectly, he added, "I don't want to know what the play is about as I'm writing. I think if I knew from the beginning, I would get bored. It [the play I'm writing] must be mysterious to me, to draw me to it."

Two other new productions of the play will quickly follow McCarter's, the first at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater and then another at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif. McCarter Theatre has had a long relationship with Cruz and has nurtured his talent since they commissioned his 1994 one-act Madrigal, which became the full-length A Park in our House, which was produced as the centerpiece of the theater's new play festival in 1995. The play went on to a production at New York Theatre Workshop the following season. McCarter later commissioned Two Sisters and a Piano, which premiered in 1999. That play went on to the Public Theater in New York. His newest play, Lorca in a Green Dress, is currently running at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

All of which makes it more astonishing that only three weeks before the Pulitzer Prize announcement in April, Cruz received yet another rejection letter from yet another New York theater (they are, no doubt, eating their hearts out now). In a classic discovery story, Anna in the Tropics was commissioned by a little theater in Coral Gables, Fla.; that production was reviewed -- with a rave -- by the critic for The Miami Herald and that review brought Cruz and his play the attention that led to this happy moment.

The moment is even more celebratory for McCarter in that Anna will be the first production in their brand new 350-seat Berlind Theatre. Designed by a Princeton alum, architect Hugh Hardy, as a long-planned addition to the McCarter mainstage house, it is named for Roger S. Berlind, an immensely successful Broadway producer (from Sondheim to Miller, from Amadeus to Kiss Me Kate). Nilo Cruz is clearly in the big leagues now.

Anna In the Tropics runs Sept. 9-Oct. 19, $30-$48, Roger S. Berlind Theatre at McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton, N.J., 609-258-ARTS.