Anna in the Tropics

TO ANNA: Priscilla Lopez, Victor Argo and Jimmy Smits taost the success of Nilo Cruz’s play.

by Toby Zinman

The good news: Nilo Cruzís Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics is a lovely, luminous play, and the McCarter production, under Emily Mannís elegant direction, is simply ravishing.

The bad news: The entire run is sold out (standing room only, $15) before it moves to Broadway.

It is summer, 1929 (and the date tells us what the characters cannot know: Everything in America is about to change drastically); in a Cuban enclave in Florida, workers in a cigar factory have, as they always have, hired a man to read to them for their entertainment and edification. This lector arrives from Havana and the book he chooses to read aloud is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina ("There's nothing like reading a winter book in the middle of summer"), a novel of catastrophic passion about a married woman, Anna (and thus the play's title), who falls in love with the seductive Count Vronsky and wreaks havoc on herself and her family. The cigar rollers listen chapter by chapter, day by day, and as they become absorbed in and affected by the fictional characters' lives, so we become absorbed in theirs.

That great literature casts a spell is one of the fine premises of the play; each listener hears according to his own needs, life and mind, and thus a book is always altered by the act of reading. If novel reading is the most intimate of literary acts (just the reader and the page), theater-going is the most communal, since the page is collaboratively and collectively interpreted by the director and the actors and the designers and -- at any given performance -- the audience. Each time the lector finishes his reading for the day, he sits at the back of the stage, softly lit, turned away from us -- exactly as a compelling book we have put down waits for our return, exerting that force field a great novel exerts when we can't wait to get back to it.

And like the cigar-rolling audience who is eager to know what happens and yet wants the story never to end, so we, the theater audience, are eager to know what will happen to these rich and textured characters, yet we want to postpone the ending as long as we can. Contrary to any easy expectation, the play's plot does not mimic that of the Russian novel's, and the links and similarities are far more intriguing because they are oblique. Cruz's poetic dialogue is full of literary imagery and poetic phrasing, and the drama is heightened by the fact that the characters speak, unselfconsciously, in novelistic rather than realistic dialogue.

All but one of this superb and starry Hispanic cast uses a luscious, accented English -- it is significant that Cheché (David Zayas), the one character who argues against tradition (he wants to convert the factory to machine-rolled cigars and wants to do away with lectors), has no accent, no trace of the past in his voice. He is also the most unhappy and most violent character and the one who is thoroughly Americanized.

But the play is not primarily about politics or economics, but about love -- passionate longing, thrilling need -- and the production is meltingly, gorgeously ardent. And it is one of the many triumphs of Emily Mann's direction that all the performances are restrained, subtle, quiet.

As the lector, Jimmy Smits is perfectly cast -- taller than anyone on stage, and thus, like fictional characters, larger than life; in a white linen suit and broad-brimmed hat, he looks the classic romantic hero. Vanessa Aspillaga is especially fine -- very charming, eager, young -- and Daphne Rubin-Vega as her older sister creates a very complex and intense tormented wife. Priscilla Lopez as their mother slides from firm practicality to tipsy playfulness and back again seamlessly.

The spare set of wooden worktables and chairs (designed by Robert Brill) suggests an old-fashioned cigar box and Peter Kaczorowski's lighting is full of golden warmth. Anita Yavich's costumes are beautiful and flattering, evoking both character and era. Emily Mann's stage pictures are composed with great forethought and delicacy.

You can still smell the fresh paint in the brand new Berlind Theatre, where the sightlines are excellent, the seats are comfy, but the exits still need figuring out. This new 360-seat house is a fine addition to McCarter's big main stage, and what an excellent inauguration it has had.

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