PhD doctorate ONLY

Source Citation: Database 

"Critical Essay on 'Anna in the Tropics'." Drama for Students. Vol. 21. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Remy, David. Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Oct. 2014. Ed. Anne Marie Hacht.

The play Anna in the Tropics harkens back to a time long since forgotten, when the cigar factories of Ybor City were bustling with activity and immigrants held hopes of a better future. As Nilo Cruz convincingly demonstrates, life in a cigar factory was hard because it was subjected to so much uncertainty and doubt, but that is not to say that it was without its pleasures. In re-creating an atmosphere of strife, conflict, and division within the factory, Cruz, borrowing a page, figuratively speaking, from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, uses the relationship of Anna, her husband, and Vronsky as a model for developing character relationships within Anna in the Tropics . By presenting his characters in triangular relationships to one another, the playwright underscores the visceral struggle waged by those who hope to survive. He creates scenes filled with drama and suspense. Moreover, communication, power struggles, and the yearning for romantic love in the play are brought into sharper focus as a result of Cruz employing this technique.

The love triangle, modeled after the example of Anna and her two lovers, is employed to great effect within the play, for characters involved in such a relationship embody the romantic stereotype of tragic lovers seeking escape and eternal union.

The role of an intermediary appears in key scenes throughout the play, and it fulfills the purpose of facilitating communication between men and women who are often too stubborn to speak directly to each other, as is the case with Santiago and Ofelia, the owners of the factory. Act 1, scene 4, opens with Marela quoting words and phrases verbatim as her parents use her to wage an escalating argument about money. The irony of the situation--one whose comic effect is not lost upon Cruz as a dramatist--is that, without Marela's presence, the couple would be at a complete stalemate. Each person would not utter a word directly to the other, and so, instead of resolving their conflict about finances, as they do once Marela leaves and silence fills the room, they might have failed to realize how beloved they really are to each other. Had Marela not intervened, Santiago and Ofelia would never have reconciled their differences and moved on to a discussion of Anna Karenina, realizing, by the end of the scene, how much their lives mirror those of Levin and Kitty in the novel. Forming the third side of a character triangle, Marela thus enables her parents to embark upon what is at first a heated discussion but which later evolves into a tender recognition filled with romantic yearning and a strong resolve to face the future together.

Another scene in which an intermediary facilitates communication occurs in act 2, scene 3, when a cigar is lit and passed around to inaugurate the new line of Anna Karenina cigars Santiago has decided to produce. According to custom, the cigar must not be passed directly to the smoker but through an intermediary, so as to "facilitate communication with the gods" (Cruz's italics). Different characters take turns forming a triad as the new cigar is passed around and met with enthusiastic praise; that is, until Palomo receives the cigar and hands it directly to Juan Julian. This single gesture not only disrupts the triangular relationship among characters but forces the two men to confront each other as rivals. The lector responds quickly to the insult--one made against him and the gods--by making an act of supplication. A scene that begins as a celebration ends in yet another standoff as Palomo and Juan Julian vie once more for Conchita's affection.

Perhaps the most important role of intermediary is performed by the lector. As a descendent of the cacique, or chief Indian, who "used to translate the words of the deities," the lector reads these words aloud from literary classics such as Anna Karenina, educating and informing the oidores, or listeners," who toil in the factory. Without him, many of the workers would have no knowledge of the outside world. Dramatically speaking, Cruz realizes the importance of the lector as a catalyst for change within the cigar factory. Juan Julian's readings permit Marela and Conchita greater freedom of imagination with which to lead their lives and fulfill their dreams, and Ofelia, among others, feels a strong connection to the past as she moves forward into the future.

In describing the struggle for control of the cigar factory, Cruz employs a triangular structure to delineate the shifting relationships between characters as they wield power and influence. With Santiago absent, Ofelia must assume control of operations immediately, especially if she wants to halt Cheché's attempts at mechanization. Thus, she forms a barrier between the two brothers though her allegiance remains quite clear. Palomo, on the other hand, shifts his loyalty as the mood suits him. He enjoys hearing Juan Julian read, paying rapt attention to the tale of Anna's illicit affair, yet he sides with Cheché when a vote is taken to determine whether the lector should stay.

The love triangle, modeled after the example of Anna and her two lovers, is employed to great effect within the play, for characters involved in such a relationship embody the romantic stereotype of tragic lovers seeking escape and eternal union. The first and most provocative example--that is to say, the one triangular relationship that acts as an underlying stimulus in the play--is that of the relationship between Cheché, his wife Mildred, and the previous lector, a triangle that dissolves when Mildred and the lector run away. Because it was a lector who cuckolded him (one, moreover, from Cuba), Cheché distrusts anyone arriving at the factory to fulfill that role, even if that someone should happen to be a professional like Juan Julian. Thus, Cheché's personal animus against lectors reveals in part his motivation for wanting to modernize the factory.

Cheché is involved in yet another love triangle that ends in an unrequited manner. Throughout the play, he seems tortured by the memory of his wife until, that is, he sees Marela dressed as a Russian lady when she models for the new cigar's label. He awkwardly tries to woo Marela, though his efforts often end in a leer. Marela, however, has eyes only for Juan Julian, the man who inspired her transformation by reading from the pages of Anna Karenina. A lover's triangle is set in motion as Marela longs for Juan Julian, who conducts an affair with her older sister even though she is married to Palomo, another roller at the factory. Cruz links triangles within triangles as the play approaches its denouement, bringing character's motivations into bold relief. Cheché, seeking fulfillment of his sexual desire, takes Marela by force, a violent act that foreshadows his eventual murder of the lector. By placing one of his characters in opposition to two others who meet tragic fates, Cruz presents a love triangle that surpasses Tolstoy's model in terms of sheer melodrama.

The play's most idealized example of a love triangle, and the one that re-creates Tolstoy's example faithfully, both in terms of its ardor and tragic outcome, is the one between Conchita, her husband Palomo, and Juan Julian. Cruz, however, modifies Tolstoy's classic love triangle by adding an element of sexual ambiguity that creates a psychological frisson between husband and wife. Palomo, aroused by Conchita's descriptions of her encounters with the lector, wants to learn more about how Juan Julian possesses her physically, prompting Conchita to remark, "You're falling in love with this man." Palomo denies this, saying that his need for additional information is merely the result of habit after having been an oidore for so long. When Conchita presses him, he admits that something else is bothering him. "And it's terrible sometimes," he adds. What was a heterosexual love triangle now adds a homosexual component to it, revealing more of the characters' psychological complexities. These personal motivations take yet another dramatic turn when Palomo, wanting to seize control of his wife's affair, suggests that Conchita tell her lover "to make love like a knife" because, he says, "everything has to be killed." The love triangle becomes too painful to maintain, creating a metaphorical death for at least one of the participants.

By placing his characters in triangular relationships, Cruz achieves a dramatic tension within Anna in the Tropics that draws upon the struggles for power and survival that mark life in the cigar factory. His homage to the Russian master confirms once again the redeeming power of art.

Source Citation: online magazine

Oct. 14, 2014. Randy Gener. American Theater. “A Dreamer from Cuba.”

Dreamer from Cuba

For Pulitzer-winner Nilo Cruz, exile is a window into hothouse landscapes of the imagination

By Randy Gener

Since taking the Freedom Flight to Miami in 1970 at the tender age of 9, Nilo Cruz has set foot in Fidel Castro’s Cuba only once. It was 1979, and he was 19. At the time, the Cuban government allowed families to visit their relatives, so Cruz and his parents spent two weeks with his two older sisters, who had remained there. Now that his sisters live in the United States, he rarely imagines going back.

“I haven’t tried,” Cruz says. “It hasn’t been the right time. I don’t have any immediate relatives left in the country. Sometimes I have the desire to witness what life is like there. Sometimes I don’t.”

Unlike many from the generation that went into exile at the beginning of the revolution, the 42-year-old Cruz has no plans to permanently return to the country of his birth. His heart is not dispossessed; it does not ache for all that he has lost or obsessively dwell on what he left behind. He is not afflicted with the disease that creeps through an exile’s mind and eats it away with torment, sentimentality and painful longings; neither is he the morose type who dreams of being buried there in old age. “I don’t feel like I am bound by the place where I was born,” Cruz remarks. “Cuba has changed tremendously. I have changed, too. I guess sometimes I fear what the impact of going back would be on me.”

But exile is not only about alienation. People in exile, as the twice-exiled Cuban poet Octavio Armand once observed, “always carry along their homes: the language, customs, traditions of their countries. They transpose and translate: they live between two shores. Their homes and landscapes live within them, although they are no longer places of physical dwelling.”

Seen in this light, the lack of a pressing need to return to Cuba is, for Nilo Cruz (pronounced knee-low), a reflection of how, in a profound and spiritual way, he has always kept strong ties to the island—and how through his writing practice, he has never forsaken it. In play after play, Cruz paints a portrait of cubania—of Cubanness—as a window out of the four walls of estrangement. His theatre is a form of escape, a flight from separation, displacement and cultural fragmentation.

In his plays, Cruz almost always journeys back to Cuba, even when the play is not set there. Cruz, who was raised in Miami and now lives in Manhattan, is no less Cuban for keeping a geographic distance between himself and the tropical island of his childhood. In Dancing on Her Knees, A Park in Our House, Two Sisters and a Piano, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams and now the Pulitzer-winning Anna in the Tropics, Cruz reconnects with the richness of his culture and the paradoxes of his identity. His artistic creations give voice to the stories, struggles and sensibilities of Cubans with nuance, great sensitivity and a hothouse theatricality.

And he writes about Cuba like a dream. His words burn with the heat of visceral imagery and lyrical emotion. His plays, even the most naturalistic ones, have something of a well-made quality to them, but they bleed into something else; they seep with magic and mysticism. Like Federico García Lorca and Gabriel García Márquez, Cruz fills his writing with symbols and metaphors, allusions to literature and references to nature—the fragrance of guavas, the wet air of the bay, the sweetness of jasmine flowers, the veins coursing through a man’s arms “like a Roman aqueduct.”

Cruz is a sensualist, a conjurer of mysterious voyages and luxuriant landscapes. He is a poetic chronicler, a documentarian of the presence of Latin people in American life. He conveys, most of all, the strength and persistence of the Cuban spirit through a wholly dramatic imagination.

“It’s not that it was an obligation,” Cruz says. “It was where my heart was. If I don’t embrace the richness of my culture, what are my options? To write about potatoes? To whitewash my characters? Just think of the fruits in the Caribbean; you have to get messy when eating a mango. But you don’t get messy if you eat an apple. You are what you eat, and the environment has an effect on us. I have to embrace that in my work. That’s the way I look at the group of people I am writing about. They’re colorful, the way that I am. I am an exotic creature.”

It was the very exoticism of Anna in the Tropics that recommended it for a 2003 Pulitzer citation. The thick foliage of Cruz’s language, surrounding the chewy bark of the play’s historical subject matter, made Anna catnip to this year’s panel of North American critics, none of whom had ever seen a production of the play but had only read its text. (This was the second time a Pulitzer has gone to a play that had not been staged in New York City, the first time being Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle in 1992.)

Commissioned by the New Theatre of Coral Gables, Fla., and written with the assistance of a National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group grant, Anna in the Tropics is now seen as the high-profile play that will propel Cruz into the mainstream consciousness. Theatregoers will no doubt “catch on” to his work from now on. The irony of this skewed view, of course, is that Cruz has been one of the most frequently produced contemporary playwrights in the U.S.—and one of the least self-imitative.

Anna already had a life prescribed for it long before it was garlanded with awards. It is scheduled to kick off the fall season at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, starting Sept. 12, under the aegis of director Henry Godinez; and at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., starting Sept. 28, with Juliette Carillo at the helm. But the first and perhaps most visible new production begins Sept. 9 at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, N.J., where Anna inaugurates the new Roger S. Berlind Theatre. Staged by McCarter artistic director Emily Mann, this production stars Jimmy Smits, Vanessa Aspillaga, Priscilla Lopez, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega and David Zayas. According to rumors in the Rialto, the McCarter’s Anna is angling for commercial berth in New York sometime in the late fall or early winter. If this happens, Broadway would seem almost to be a destiny foretold—an inevitability, if not an afterthought.

In the meantime, Cruz has moved on to other projects. He is in the midst of a creative period under the bewitching spell of Federico García Lorca, whose plays Doña Rosita the Spinster and The House of Bernarda Alba he has translated from the original Spanish. (He also adapted García Márquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings for Minneapolis’s Children’s Theatre Company.) Cruz’s ritualistic drama Lorca in a Green Dress, which runs through Nov. 2 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is a surreal rumination (with at least six Lorca phantasms) on the wartime death of the Spanish poet and dramatist who was killed in 1936 by Franco’s Nationalist forces near Granada. Lorca reappears, this time as a ghost, in the South Coast Rep commission Beauty of the Father, which will make its world premiere in January ’04 at the intimate New Theatre in Coral Gables, where Anna was first staged in October ’02. 

Beauty of the Father, to be directed by New Theatre’s artistic leader Rafael de Acha, is Cruz’s most contemporary work to date. Set in 1998 on the Mediterranean beaches of Spain’s Costa del Sol, the play enacts the reunion between a young woman, Marina, whose mother has just died, and her gay father, Emiliano, a sculptor who had abandoned her. Karim, a handsome Moroccan boy, comes between them, having stolen both their hearts. Standing among the paintings and sculptures in Emiliano’s villa is the presiding spirit of Lorca dressed in a white suit; he is advising Emiliano on how to fight his inner demons and beat back the unhappiness in his life. There is also an unfinished statue of Lorca, whose work-in-progress state is perhaps a harbinger of the uneasy efforts of the father and daughter to repair their estranged relationship.

“Lorca was an exile in New York, and I find that artists are like exiles in the world,” Cruz says. “We are looking at the world from the outside in order to write about it, to reflect on it. Sometimes audiences are not ready to see the world the way we see it. Yet we show them a mirror.”

In its portrayal of the spiritual force of literature and art, Anna in the Tropics holds up a semihistorical mirror to the lost world of Cuban tabaquerías (cigar factories). Set in 1929 in what is today a section of Tampa, Fla., Anna’s story probes into the loves and lives of a family of cigar workers in the Spanish-Cuban community of Ybor City. Once upon a time, Ybor City, the “Cigar Capital of the World,” was a busy manufacturing center of hand-rolled cigars—until several factors converged in the 1930s to bring about hard times. A major depression struck the nation, cigarette consumption grew, and improved machinery for rolling cigars began to produce a product comparable in workmanship to the hand-rolled variety.

Cruz’s luscious Anna, which traces Ybor City’s decline, also revivifies the old tradition of lectores. In those days, factory workers, who were largely illiterate, contributed about 25 cents per week for the services of lectores (readers), men who sat on a platform and in a clear voice read aloud from novels and newspapers while the tabaqueros worked, rolling and cutting cigars. The workers treasured the right to select the reading materials, and so lectores might read from the classic works of Calderón, Lope De Vega, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Lorca. These talented lectores were also a voice for Cuban workers. After 1900, much of what was being read consisted of socialist, anarchist and communist literature mixed with local news and popular novels; because of its proximity, Ybor City was a critical area of congregation for those who pushed for Cuban sovereignty from Spain.

Infused with language that is full of poetic feeling and mythic dimension, Anna dramatizes the catalytic effect of a new lector who arrives by boat from Cuba. Cruz scoured the University of Miami archives to research the play, which originally bore the working title Ybor City. “José Martí [the poet and national hero, dubbed ‘the George Washington of Cuba’] lived in New York and read at factories in Tampa. He organized a whole brigade of cigar-rollers who went back to Cuba to fight for its independence. At first, I was going to write more about that, but it would’ve become more of a historical play.”

The thematic focus shifted, however, when Cruz pushed away the overwhelming research he had done and, as is typical of his writing process, followed his intuition instead. In Anna in the Tropics, Juan Julian, the new lector who comes to town and shakes things up, decides to read Leo Tolstoy’s 19th-century novel of adultery, Anna Karenina, the Anna of the play’s title. This choice proved pivotal. “I usually don’t know the structure of the play, but once I discovered the book that was being read to the workers, that was when the writing of the play took off,” Cruz recalls. “I am very respectful of books, but when I started to read Anna Karenina through the eyes of the characters in the play, I found myself writing in the margins of the pages. I was reacting to passages in the novel. The writing was coming so fast. And the story of Anna Karenina becomes the catalyst that changes the lives of the cigar workers.”

Anna in the Tropics thus evolved into an affirmation of the power of art—how art can alter the murmurs of the heart. “It’s like that old saying: I read this book, and it changed the way I see the world, or I saw this movie, and it changed my life,” says Cruz. “For me, that theme is also political.”

Does he want people to read the Tolstoy book? “Yes, certainly, but that was not my initial intention,” Cruz replies. “There have been books that have done that to me—García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Jorge Borges. When I was writing Anna, I just loved the notion of illiterate cigar-rollers quoting Don Quixote and Shakespeare by heart. This play is about the need for culture, the need for literature. Art should be dangerous.”

Besides giving his dramatic imagination free rein, Anna Karenina spurred him to concoct, in one of the play’s felicitous moments, his own cigar brand. “I remember being fascinated by cigar boxes and the art or aesthetic behind those boxes,” he recalls. “They’re very romantic and quite elaborate. A lot of the cigar labels are named after romantic love stories, like Romeo y Julieta or El Dante. You can still buy these cigars from Havana today. But there was never a cigar label called Anna Karenina, at least not that I know of. Because of Anna Karenina being at the center of the play, I find that there is no one main character in this particular script. If we really had to search for a main character, it would be Tolstoy’s book.”

It was purely on the basis of the script of Anna that Cruz became the first Latin American dramatist to win the Pulitzer Prize. For him, it almost seemed one of those impossible episodes that would be credible if it had occurred in a magic-realist fiction. “They [the jurors] listened to the script,” says Cruz, erupting into a smile. “They didn’t see the play, which is great. They read it, and they listened to the words—this is what Anna is all about.”

People in exile are living documents, their very language is a document. Thus the obsession, which grips some as if they were notaries, with fixing an image, a moment. —Octavio Armand

Nilo Cruz was born in Matanzas, Cuba, a year after the revolution began, and from the time of his earliest memories, his parents had always wanted out. His father, a shoe salesman, was outspoken about his dissatisfaction with Castro’s government and his opposition to the country’s militarization. In 1962 he was incarcerated for two years as a political prisoner, leaving Nilo with his grandmother, two sisters and a mother who had to work as a seamstress. He was two years old at the time.

“We weren’t rich,” Cruz recalls. “Militiamen would come to our house sometimes at night, and they would try to get my father to go out in the field to cut sugar cane. He explained to them that he had developed a disability, back problems, while in prison, but the militiamen thought he was lying. My father was caught [on shipboard] the first time he tried to leave the country on his own. He was going to pave the way for us in the U.S., because you need someone here to claim you.”

His parents held the communist system in contempt. They frequently bought meat from the black market to put on the dinner table. In order to exempt Nilo from regimented physical education classes, his mother asked a doctor friend of the family to diagnose the boy with hepatitis. “That influenced my life as a child, because I was not able to play outside in my neighborhood as I had done before,” he says.

While his parents waited for their immigration papers to be approved, Nilo’s childhood came to an end. “I lived a double life in Cuba,” he recalls. “I was taught to lie at a young age. We had to pretend that we lived in a communist household. When my parents were in the last stage of making plans to leave for Miami, I had to pretend that we still believed in the system. I would hear my parents talking about how they got their passports together, but I could not talk about it to other friends or in school. I remember being caught up in a dual reality.”

Tina, Nilo’s mother, several years previously, had tucked away a pair of traveling shoes for her son; she had purchased shoes that were two sizes bigger than he’d needed, in anticipation of their exodus. But, by the time Nilo left Cuba, he had already outgrown them. “I remember my first experience in the airport,” he says. “I tell you, we had to wait for hours, and I started to get blisters on my feet. So I came to the U.S. very much barefoot. After we landed in Miami, my parents immediately took me to a shoe store. There’s a whole scene about shoes in my play Two Sisters and a Piano.”

Cruz’s sense of confusion continued on the bicultural shores of Miami, where he was told to lie again: He was to claim that his family was Baptist, not Catholic, because someone led his parents to believe that doing so would reap them “more benefits.” “Of course, it didn’t work,” says the playwright, adding that his life as a boy was even more sheltered in the U.S. “There were racial riots going on in Miami, and my parents were terrified of letting me go out in the streets to play with friends. Then, of course, there was the problem of learning a new language.”

Cruz wrote his 1994 play A Park in Our House as a way of coming to emotional terms with the uprooting of his family. It began at McCarter Theatre as a one-act about a woman (not unlike his mother) who illegally buys a pig from the black market. The full-length version of Park unfolds over a month in 1970, the year Cruz left Cuba for Miami, when Castro put the country to work harvesting 10 million tons of sugar. An episodic family drama in the sad-funny slice-of-life vein of Anton Chekhov, the play dramatizes the slow-burn desperation and aching dreams of a closely knit family of five. This family opens up its house to a Russian visitor en route to political asylum in Brazil; he stirs up trouble, engaging his hosts in heated rhetoric about Cold War politics and social values.

“The whole concept of the revolution was such a mystery to me,” Cruz says. “At the time, I didn’t understand why we were leaving, why politics was such a strong force in our lives. I think my parents were concerned I would hit military age; I could have ended up in Angola. I had to write Park to understand that year of coming to America. I had to go back and grasp the essence. Park helped me understand my loss of innocence.”

Cruz’s theatre is multilayered in its examination of how sudden shifts in the political landscape have crushed a way of life for Cuba’s populace—but his plays aren’t seared and singed by anger, nationalist dogma or postcolonial disgust. Even the most political of his plays, 1998’s Two Sisters and a Piano (scheduled to be revived at San Diego’s Old Globe in March ’04), declines to raise an accusatory fist against specifically named tyrants or dictators. Set in 1991, at the moment of perestroika, Two Sisters and a Piano is about a writer and a musician under house arrest in Cuba—two sisters who tremble with desire for the outside world, for free speech and for sexual liberation. The play dramatizes the brutal reality of oppression and dictatorial rule and expresses the bitter disillusionment of many Cuban exiles and dissident artists left behind. Because the play does not soil itself by naming Castro, an aura of disconcerting stasis lingers over it, suggesting that corruption, fear and misery were just as noxious during the time of Fulgencio Batista.

“The politics in my plays are very simple,” Cruz says says. “Two Sisters is about women who make the best out of their lives, even though they live in very harsh conditions. They create a little paradise in their house; even though they are under arrest, they put out their beautiful china and lay down a tablecloth—they have dinner like queens. The play is about the integrity and dignity they show in the face of oppression.”

Like Marguerite Duras, a writer alluded to in Beauty of the Father, Cruz believes that to join a party is to achieve political loss, because it means adhering to a certain mentality and living within a set of limitations. “The regimentation of belonging to a group forces you to abide to a certain political ideology,” he says. “But what I’m interested in is the individual. I don’t write with an agenda.”

Cruz has had many influences in his life as a writer. He discovered the poetry of Emily Dickinson in elementary school; he got involved in drama at a Miami community college where he became a member of Teresa María Rojas’s Prometeo troupe; Paula Vogel offered him a full scholarship to attend her graduate playwriting program at Brown University, even though he had never graduated from college. But in its refusal to embrace an uncritical model of political identity, Cruz’s sense of cubania most reflects the incalculable impact that Maria Irene Fornes has had on his development as an artist.

There is little question that the lyrical politics of Fornes, who is also Cuban American—along with her intuitive search for a new theatrical grammar that issues organically from the emotional center—shaped Cruz to become the writer he is today. They met in Miami on a Friday in 1988. In short order, Fornes invited Cruz, who had been flirting with acting and directing, to join her now-defunct INTAR Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory in New York. “Irene came to the college to do a workshop, and she liked what I had written,” he recalls. “She said she had one space available at INTAR. She asked me if I wanted to take the workshop, but I had to make the decision right away.” Cruz quit his job at a cargo airport, arranged to sleep on a friend’s couch, borrowed a winter coat, took a train to New York on Sunday and attended Fornes’s workshop beginning the next Monday.

“My whole life changed,” he says. 

“I ruined Nilo for the rest of his life,” Fornes deadpans.

Far from it: Cruz learned to assemble his plays in the Fornes manner, where no premeditation or conceptual thinking is involved, where ideas per se are seen as unproductive, but the needs of the characters are paramount. “I come from the Irene Fornes School,” Cruz says flatly. “You don’t write a play about an idea—you write a play about characters. I think it’s the only way to write. My impetus always begins with the characters; somehow later on I reflect on the political situation around those characters by asking, ‘How does the human spirit transcend all this?’” So if, for instance, gay characters show up in his plays, their presence stems from unconscious impulses. “I’m very interested in writing about homosexuality,” he says, “but rather than a conscious choice, it’s a given, like the color blue. I am not a theme-oriented kind of writer. If a character happens to be gay, I just run with it. In fact, there are aspects of a gay sensibility in all my work.”

Nilo is very Cuban in the way he sees and reacts to things. It’s very hard to separate him from Cuba. You feel that he’s inviting you into a world that is not the kind you see every day. A door is opened, and you want to look.

—Maria Irene Fornes

The journey to Havana, whether literal or metaphorical, is treacherous. Decades after Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba, powerful feelings of loyalty and obligation to the country persist among Cuban exiles living in the U.S. At its most volatile, that sense of devotion exerts an ideological tug that yanks many Cuban writers and artists, inside and outside Cuba, like a heavy chain. It can be a trap. Fanatical Cuba supporters believe that stating anything critical in public is equivalent to an outright attack on the revolution. Exiled extremists dismiss as soft or spineless those artists who don’t take a rigid anti-Castro stance. Left-wing hardliners on the island slam artists who devise ways to maintain their creative autonomy, calling them gusanos (worms, or traitors to the homeland).

Cuban-American artists striving to uphold their personal sense of cubania in the U.S. are therefore placed in a difficult position. This paradox explains, in part, why Cruz identifies with Lorca just as strongly as Conchita and Marela, the female characters in Anna in the Tropics, feel kinship with Tolstoy’s 19th-century heroine. “Lorca was controversial in Spain,” Cruz says. “Because he denounced the upper class, he was called a communist. Because of my own work, I’ve been classified as a right-wing Cuban, and yet some Cubans in Miami see my work as not one-sided enough. People have a need to classify artists in categories. Lorca did not want to be classified; he was a nonconformist. He said, ‘No, I’m more than that. I’m a poet.’”

Like Lorca and Fornes, Cruz, the poet from Matanzas, frustrates those who would like to assign political labels to his plays and pin them down, like dead butterflies. To read this Cuban expatriate’s plays merely on the basis of their promotion of a political agenda is to completely misconstrue his intention—and to overlook the luminous ways his writing proposes an image of cubania.

This image, of a real world that ripens into a magical world, is articulated in fully theatrical terms. There is a thick humidity to the language in Cruz’s plays. Consider the carnal undertone that runs underneath this bit of small talk between Julian and the love-besotted Marela in Anna in the Tropics:

JUAN JULIAN: It’s curious, there are no mountains or hills here. Lots of sky I have noticed…And clouds…. The largest clouds I’ve ever seen, as if they had soaked up the whole sea. It’s all so flat all around. That’s why the sky seems so much bigger here and infinite. Bigger than the sky I know back home. And there’s so much light. There doesn’t seem to be a place where one could hide.

MARELA: One can always find shade in the park. There’s always a hiding place to be found, and if not, one can always hide behind light.

JUAN JULIAN: Really. And how does one hide behind light? 

(The women laugh nervously.)

MARELA: Depends what you are hiding from.

JUAN JULIAN: Perhaps light itself. 

MARELA: Well, there are many kinds of light. The light of fires. The light of stars. The light that reflects off rivers. Light that penetrates through cracks. Then there’s the type of light that reflects off the skin. Which one? 

JUAN JULIAN: Perhaps the type that reflects off the skin.

MARELA: That’s the most difficult one to escape.

Cruz, as these lines attest, is a poet of flushed cadences and restless desire. Through words, he creates structures of feelings that capture the fragility of human relationships. His plays plunge into in-between spaces and in-between cracks: When in Anna in the Tropics, the lector, Juan Julian, kisses and embraces Conchita, the factory owner’s eldest daughter, in plain sight of her husband, Palomo, the voyeurism is rendered truthfully, because Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—literature itself—hovers over the action like an indescribable cloud.

A mysteriousness saturates and shrouds all of Cruz’s work. He describes his high-flown style as “realism that is magical,” meaning that immediate reality veers, going beyond logic and belief: vines of hair grow for kilometers in Park in Our House; the floating souls of two tango dancers appear suddenly on Miami Beach in Dancing on Her Knees; because of an aging disorder, a brother and sister in their forties, both survivors of Operation Pedro Pan, look a decade younger when they set foot in Cuba in 1998 (the year of Pope John Paul’s historic visit) in Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams.

Politics and magic make for strange bedfellows. Rooted in a solid sense of time and place, Anna in the Tropics represents something of a stylistic departure for Cruz—it is the first play in his oeuvre to paint a wholly naturalistic portrait of the dreams and dramas of Cubans outside the island. And yet this play, though old-fashioned in form, holds a deep love and sorrow for Cubans, no more or less than those other plays that elaborate upon a Cuba of the imagination. 

Nilo Cruz’s plays transform theatrical language into a living image of the exile’s experience. They are poetical chronicles of the human costs of harsh economic and political realities; they tell the truth about Cuba without dogmatic rants, manifestos or pronouncements. Cuba may be a politically conflicted island paradise swathed in the cold paint of poverty, lies, fanaticism, oppression and tyrannical structures. But in Cruz’s fertile imagination, it is also a museum of dreams, of beauty, of love, of memory, of tradition, of humble lives mainly forgotten but passionately lived. Cuba is the light he finds most difficult to extinguish.

Anna in the Tropics

Source Citation: an online magazine

Theatermania Author: Jonathan Abarbanel. Sep 25, 2003. Title; “Anna in the Tropics”

Dale Rivera and Charin Alvarez

in Anna in the Tropics

(Photo © Liz Lauren)

Chicago's Tony Award-winning Victory Gardens Theater announced late last winter that it would open its next season with Anna in the Tropics by Cuban-American author Nilo Cruz. Soon after, the play won the Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Overnight, Victory Gardens had a high-profile play and playwright on its schedule.

The South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California and the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey are also staging Anna in the Tropics, almost simultaneously with Victory Gardens. The Broadway-bound McCarter production features Latino star Jimmy Smits. In contrast, the Victory Gardens production boasts salt-of-the-earth Chicago actors and is the most intimate of the three stagings, performed in a 195-seat house.

Cigars are still hand-rolled in Anna in the Tropics, set in a small Tampa, Florida cigar factory in 1929. Santiago owns the family-run business but has gambled away a few shares to his sullen half-brother Cheche, the manager. Santiago's wife Ofelia, daughters Conchita and Marela, and son-in-law Palomo (Conchita's husband) are rollers. The silent drudgery of their job is alleviated by a "lector," hired to read newspapers, poetry, and novels to the workers. (The lector tradition, and most skilled rollers, were lost to rolling machines a few years later.)

Cruz opens the play with bold strokes, placing the men at a raucous cockfight on one side of the stage and the women on the other side, romanticizing the as-yet-unseen new lector. When Juan Julian arrives, he turns out to be young, handsome, and alluring. In seconds, Cruz has placed the pen and sword in opposition: blood sport against a spiritual ideal; the longings of the heart against violent reality. Resolving the conflict between longing and violence -- often different aspects of the same passion -- requires a blood sacrifice.

Juan Julian reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (pronounced in Spanish as "car-eh-NEEN-ah"), not knowing the passions that it inflames will make him part of three triangles. Triangle One: Cheche's wife has run off with a previous lector and now Cheche lusts after his beautiful niece, Marela, but she has eyes for Juan. Triangle Two: Santiago frustrates Cheche's plans to mechanize the factory, so Cheche has ample reason to despise both the lector tradition and Juan Julian himself. Triangle Three: Conchita and Palomo recognize the death of caring in their marriage and, with Palomo's tacit approval, Conchita and Juan become lovers. Juan is neither protagonist nor antagonist, but catalyst. The figures who must find paths out of the morass are Cheche and Palomo. One of them chooses violence.

The cast of Anna in the Tropics

(Photo © Liz Lauren)

Cruz is not subtle. He states and repeats his themes in obvious strokes, and there is much heavy foreshadowing in the play. But the author's seemingly plain-spoken language frequently shimmers and is strong of rhythm. The passions of love and lust are delicately observed -- sometimes with wonder, never with vulgarity. The characters are sympathetic and true. Running just over two hours with intermission, Anna in the Tropics is nonetheless an unrushed play in which language is savored and emotions simmer. These are the reasons why it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Looking like a young Desi Arnaz, Dale Rivera cuts a handsome figure as the calm and courtly Juan Julian -- a character about whom we learn very little and who sometimes seems all things to all people. Serving as the antagonist, Ricardo Gutierrez conveys Cheche's pain and frustration, but there's more to the character than that. Ditto, Edward Torres, who offers an understated performance as Palomo against the spirited, sometimes fiery Conchita of Charin Alvarez. Sandra Delgado is youthful and dreamy as Marela, the least complete character, whose story is left unfinished. Gustavo Mellado and Sandra Marquez charmingly complete the cast as the Ma & Pa factory owners.

Director Henry Godinez -- a Cuban-born American, like Cruz -- seems not to have helped the actors display all the dimensions of the characters. This is especially true of Cheche and Palomo; the latter is the one who changes most, and we need to understand better the renewal of ardor that sparks his transition. Godinez has blocked the play simply on the small Victory Gardens stage, which is filled mainly with a large table and the cigar rollers' desks. We glimpse the ocean through the louvered windows of Mary Griswold's set, while ceiling fans cast rotating shadows on the walls thanks to Jaymi Lee Smith's soft, warm lighting. Judith Lundberg's often elegant, summer-weight period costumes complete the tropical feel.

Source Citation: online magazine

“Nilo Cruz”

Volume 86

Winter 2004.

Bomb

Emily Mann

Tony Plana, Geoffrey Ricas, Julian Acosta, Onahoua Rodriguez, Adriana Sevan and Karmin Murcela in Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, South Coast Repertory, California, 2003. Photo: Ken Howard. All images courtesy of South Coast Repertory, California.

Nilo Cruz and I recently found an hour to sit down with a tape recorder in my office at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. Anna in the Tropics, Nilo’s latest play, had opened our new Roger S. Berlind Theatre a few weeks earlier, though we were still rehearsing and fine-tuning it before it moved to New York. The interview gave us a rare moment to have a cup of coffee together, relax and just talk.

It has been nearly ten years since I was introduced to Nilo’s work by McCarter’s dramaturg, Janice Paran, and Loretta Greco, who was then McCarter’s associate director. They had urged me to consider commissioning something from him for a festival of new work we were planning. I’ll never forget the moment I started to read Night Train to Bolina. From the first words of the play, I was stunned by Nilo’s language. The writing was honest and searingly alive. This was a writer, a real writer, who had an absolutely unique playwright’s voice. We immediately commissioned him to write a one-act play, and that was the beginning of a long association between Nilo and McCarter. He expanded the one-act into the full-length play A Park in Our House, which became the centerpiece of our 1995 festival; another short play commission turned into another full-length play, Two Sisters and a Piano, which premiered on our main stage in 1999. This year, while looking for a special project to inaugurate the Berlind Theatre, we read Anna in the Tropics, which had just opened at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida. Set in a Cuban-American cigar factory in 1929, the play tells the story of a “lector” who is hired to read aloud to the workers, and what happens when the novel he chooses—Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—begins to seep into their lives. I had been waiting for an opportunity to direct one of Nilo’s plays myself, and this one seemed a perfect fit, so I took the leap. We soon had even more cause for celebration when Nilo was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for the play, and Roger Berlind, the Broadway producer for whom our new theater is named, decided to bring it to Broadway following its McCarter run. With a brilliant all-Latino ensemble cast of actors led by Jimmy Smits, Anna in the Tropics opened in New York in November at the Royale Theatre.

 

The following interview took place on October 8, 2003.

Emily Mann Did you see the show Sunday night? What do you think about John [Ortiz, who plays Palomo] being there at the end of Act One, at a completely different time?

Nilo Cruz The audience was really taken by it.

EM I think it works now. It totally changes the focus. Of course, it depends on what you want. After this we should talk about it. But for the first time, I liked it.

NC It brought a certain kind of tension.

EM Yeah. So let’s talk about your journey as a writer, and then what our working together was like. How playwrights and directors can work together when it’s a good connection. But first, I have to ask: Has your life changed since you won the Pulitzer Prize?

NC (laughter) Yeah, it has changed a lot. I used to be a very private person, and now I’m more of a public person. I haven’t had any time to write since April, when the award was announced. I haven’t been able to work on the plays that I was writing before I got the award. Everything has been about Anna. And of course I’ve also had three productions going on, so—

EM So you might not have had any time anyway; you’ve had to shepherd all three productions.

NC Completely. And this summer I also had a production of a new text: Lorca in a Green Dress.

EM You’ve been going nonstop, dealing with the fruits of your writing labors. But on top of that, what did the Pulitzer do that changed your life? Did all the interviews, all the people wanting to know about you, eat up your time?

NC People want to put a face with the name; there’s a lot of interest from theater journals, but also within the Hispanic community, the Latino community, or whatever you want to call it—

EM I was going to ask you, what should we call it?

NC Let’s call it Latino. That’s the way to do it. They’re so proud that someone from the community has won the Pulitzer. I’m the first one to win it in drama. So again, I think they want to know, Who is this person behind the plays? Who is this writer? I’ve been responding to that and doing a lot of interviews.

EM Do you feel a sense of responsibility to the community, more than you used to?

NC I can only respond as an artist, because that’s what I am. I’m not going to become a politician all of a sudden. I am a politician in terms of the plays that I write, the way I embrace culture, the way I embrace characters that, in my particular case, have to do with the Latino world. And I embrace the Latino experience. For instance, Anna in the Tropics documents the presence of Spaniards and Cubans in this country in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I thought it was important to write about that.

EM That was your starting point, right?

NC Yes. I knew there was a group of people who came here then, not just as immigrants but also as exiles. Some of them were controversial in Cuba because they were fighting for Cuba’s independence. If they had stayed there they would have been killed. We have to remember that Cuba was the last colony to be liberated from Spain. Ybor City, where the play is set, was named after Vicente Ybor, a Spaniard who had a cigar factory in Cuba. He was in favor of the island’s war against Spain, which made him very controversial. Some of these folks came to the States and started a new life, but with the hopes of returning to Cuba and fighting the war.

EM When did you find out about the lectores, who would read literature out loud to the cigar factory workers?

NC I found out through my father.

EM So you knew about this for a long time.

NC I have known about the lectores since I was a teenager. Much later on, when I was in my twenties, I read about José Martí, Cuba’s greatest poet, reading at one of the tabaquerias, the cigar factories, in Tampa, and I thought, I would like to write about this one day.

EM Oh, I didn’t realize it was that connected to Martí.

NC When I started writing the play, I thought I was going to set it in the late 1800s. I thought it was going to be more historical, more political. That was an exciting time, when Martí went into those Tampa factories and created a brigade to go fight for Cuba’s independence. But then I thought, It’s too much—it was so much information. I didn’t know how to sculpt that kind of play. I thought that my initial idea of concentrating on lectores would disappear, that it would become too much of a historical play.

EM I think it would have.

NC In doing the research I discovered that in 1929, at the beginning of the Depression, the lectores were the first ones to be fired from the cigar factories. I thought, This is the time to set the play, just as the factories are being industrialized. Just on the brink of change.

Tony Plana (Santiago) and Geoffrey Rivas (Cheché) in Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, South Coast Repertory, California, 2003. Photo: Ken Howard.

EM I’ve told you that a lot of your writing reminds me of Chekhov. With The Cherry Orchard, for instance, you’re seeing the end of an age, a certain way of life coming to a close. And there’s something of that in your play, a society that was so deeply rooted in the cigar factories, the social clubs—the social unit that all that signified. They don’t know that they’re on the verge of a huge change. We hear it a little bit from Cheché: “We’ve got to bring in the machines” and all that. But they don’t know it’s the eve of the Depression. They don’t know that machines will be taking over their jobs. I think that pathos is really gorgeous in the play.

NC Writing about the Spaniards and Cubans in Florida during that time, I wanted to identify some of the things you lose in order to integrate yourself into this society, when you enter this North American landscape. These cigar rollers came from an island that is not very rich in resources, so the little they had they valued. The tabaquerias back on the island flourished after tobacco replaced coffee as Cuba’s most lucrative export in the mid-1840s, so that’s the kind of trade these people brought with them, which helped boost Tampa’s economy. Imagine, by the end of the 1800s Tampa had become the capital of the North American Clear Havana cigar industry. It even rivaled Havana itself. And there was this beautiful tradition of the lectores, which sadly came to an end here in North America. That, of course, had to do with the industrialization of the factories. As you said before, the world was starting to change: modernity, productivity, advancement, all came with the new era. Machines were introduced into the workplace, and the intrusion of these machines destroyed the silence necessary for a lector to read from newspapers and novels to the workers. Nobody could hear them read over the sound of the machines. And, of course, it was the beginning of the Depression, and the first employees to be fired from these factories were the lectores. That’s what America is all about, isn’t it? “Next!” The tradition of the lectores has been traced back to the Taíno Indians, by the way. The cacique, or chief, used to offer cigar smoke to the deities, and he would communicate to the gods. The rest of the tribe would sit silently rolling cigars while the cacique translated the sacred language spoken by the divine beings. That was the genesis of this tradition, believe it or not.

EM There’s something about this play of yours that places it in a particular American playwrighting tradition, which has to do with how groups or cultures live their lives. We’ve seen this with women, and with black people, and, in the early days of the last century, with Jews. The point is, America is made up of immigrants, but we have yet to see many Latino stories on our stages. Every one of your plays is really about a Cuban immigrant. The immigrant experience is what America is based on. There’s a tradition of great literature that comes out of that. This has the smell of a classic American play to me because it is not only specifically about their culture but about them in America. They’re Americans; they talk about it. Why are they taking a vote? “Let’s do it the democratic way. We are in America.” It connects with the entire country, though it’s about a particular people at a particular place at a particular time. I love how generous it is.

NC Something I’ve noticed in producing my work throughout the country, in different cities but especially Palm Beach—there is a large population of Jews in Palm Beach, and they immediately connected with my work. They knew the world of the play, even though it is a Cuban world. As a matter of fact, I wrote an article for a local Jewish literary magazine that had to do with the play and with people fleeing Cuba on rafts. I made parallels. I think I actually quoted from Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento. She describes how sometimes you begin to paint a certain landscape or a certain figure and then change your mind and paint over it and start creating a new image. The years go by and that initial image starts to appear in the painting as the other image starts to fade: the original one starts to seep in. When I started writing, I was terrified about writing about Cuba, because the subject matter was so controversial in this country. I was in Miami doing the International Hispanic Theater Festival, and one play got bomb threats. The Cuban community in Miami thought that this particular writer was leftist, pro Castro. The play that I had written had to do with Italian immigrants, but basically I was writing about the Cuban exodus. Much later, when I actually embraced my culture and had the courage to write directly about it, I went back to that play and changed it all. Now they’re Cuban exiles.

EM Which play is this?

NC A Bicycle Country. It’s interesting—it was not hard to make the transition. I just had to see it with different eyes all of a sudden; it was the same kind of journey, these people coming from Italy to the United States during World War II.

EM Going back to my culture, sometimes I look at Anna as a Jewish play, and it helps me get into another level of it. The values are almost identical: it’s about family, about love, about education, about wanting to make something of yourself in this country. That’s what I was brought up with. The difference between those who can rise up and those who can’t is education. And family, and love. What else is going on in the play but all these values?

NC You’ve tapped into the emotional life of the play. Even at the beginning, when we read the play and you would stand in for an actor who was missing, you knew the rhythms and the world very well.

EM Part of it is knowing you so well, and part of it’s the play itself. It immediately struck me when I read it on the page. I heard it, I felt it, I saw it. Those three women did something to my heart. How the character of Juan Julian, the lector, affects the men and the women, how their lives change as a result of his reading Anna Karenina to them, but also the way he brings it to them. Not just anyone reading Anna Karenina would do what he does to this group. He embodies every single one of those characters: Anna, Vronsky, Levin…. He understands them all; he can become them all. And when he reads, he brings it all to them. And they internalize the book.

NC I believe it’s something that happens when one is around art, and when one is close to books: they seep into your system, into your blood, and start to activate something in your life. We start living in the way that some of these characters live, with some sense of their sensibility. It’s almost as if the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader. That’s very much what I’m doing in Anna too: the play becomes the book Anna Karenina, and the book informs the play. There’s a marriage between reader and writer. Jorge Luis Borges said that books grow. The writer writes the books, but in our interpretation we layer the book in different ways. Talk about pentimenti. We layer it with our understanding. In theater, it’s what the director brings to the play and how the director shapes the material and brings a different focus that might enhance the story.

 

Karmin Murcela (Ofelia), Julian Acosta (Juan Julian), Adriana Sevan (Conchita) and Onahoua Rodriguez (Marela) in Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, South Coast Repertory, California, 2003. Photo: Ken Howard.

EM It also happens in terms of artists: whether you’re a director or a reader or an audience member, your own experiences change you. And the age you are when you connect with a piece of art, be it painting or literature, informs your interpretation. When I first read Anna Karenina as an undergraduate, all I could read were the Vronsky passages. The other stuff was not at all interesting to me: you know, Levin, Kitty, the structure of Russian society, the serfs. I flipped past it all to find out what was happening with Anna and her lover. I reread the book this past summer, and this time I was mesmerized by Levin. I experienced the book on a whole other level, the fabric of society that Tolstoy so brilliantly depicts: that wonderful chapter when Levin is threshing, for instance, and eventually learns to give in to its rhythms. It’s what the creative process is all about, how to let go. Suddenly the novel was brilliant to me in a new way, and I thought, Well, it’s a good thing I grew up a little in 30 years. And I could bring that to the play. I understand why Santiago, the cigar factory owner in the play, admires Levin more than any other character in the novel. When Santiago asks his wife whether there is only one woman for Levin and she says “Yes, for Levin there’s only one woman,” the resonance is enormous. When I look at who Juan Julian could be, his different aspects, the novel goes through my mind. I learn something about your characters from the characters in Anna Karenina. Some of the play’s motor comes from the love story between the lector and Conchita, but other characters in the play, especially Santiago and his wife Ofelia, are also being affected by Tolstoy’s characters. Having lived through a number of layers of the book, I have more to bring to the play, I hope, than if I were directing it in my twenties.

NC In that important scene between Conchita and her husband, Palomo, which has to do with sensuality and sexuality, when we were trying it in front of an audience, we got certain laughs: celebratory laughs. It’s important to make a distinction between different laughs: some are laughs of joy, others are just comedic laughs—

EM Some are laughs of recognition.

NC Yeah. With the laughter we were getting, it was clear that the audience was celebrating Conchita and the change that she had made. But you wanted something more. You said, It’s not about celebration. It’s something more profound, where there is no laughter whatsoever, but there is listening. You went deeper into the character of Conchita, and you helped Daphne [Rubin-Vega], the actor, understand what she was dealing with. That moment is about how couples speak to each other. How do we talk about sex when we’re a couple? How do we talk about different levels of what we’re feeling? Especially in that particular scene, where she’s talking about her lover.

EM Right. How do you talk to your husband about your lover?

NC And I was so grateful that you found a way of navigating the scene. It didn’t just stay on the surface.

EM I learn so much from audiences. I love listening to audiences. They tell you where the surprise is, or when something is truly funny. Of course there is a beautiful comedic strain in the play, but if there’s also laughter of discomfort, then you can decide whether or not you want them uncomfortable at that moment. And if so, in what way, so that you’re in control of the laughter. The audience can’t take that away from you. And that means that you have to deeply inhabit the moment of both the terror and the courage it takes to speak almost the unspeakable to your husband, to talk about being taken somewhere sexually, imaginatively, to a place you’ve never been with him. It has a solemn resonance; the consequences are potentially so great. Once certain things are said in a relationship, you can never take them back. This will be one of those times, and Conchita knows that. But she needs to tell him. And then John went another step too, toward what it did to Palomo to hear it. And it’s not that it’s not celebratory, because isn’t it wonderful that she has finally had this breakthrough, if you will, and that she has the courage to tell him, given their history, but it wakes you up to how painful this exchange is for him. The audience can’t quite take it so lightly. That was a great challenge.

NC It’s what the play is trying to investigate: we don’t just want to stay in the relationship between a man and a woman. What we’re after here is a deeper sense of being that has to do with sexuality and desire. This particular scene deals with Conchita’s projection of desire onto another man, whom she wishes were her husband. She gives in to the lector, to this stranger, to this reader of love stories as a way of rescuing a part of herself. The lector fills the void the husband has left in her. It is the husband who pushes her into making this decision through his behavior. He has practically extinguished her light. He probably dictated her sexuality, as happens with most men: they try to take control of women’s sexuality, of their lives, of that moment of intimacy in which the body becomes pure spirit. It is part of their nature, a form of manipulation. I’ve seen it over and over again, especially in Latin culture. Nevertheless, what I find curious is not what the illicit love affair with the lector does to Conchita but what it does to Palomo. As the reader of the love stories, the lector embodies both the male and the female. Conchita and her husband both attach their desires to the lector. It is through him that Conchita and her husband find each other again—through the geography of this other body, through the landscape of literature, through the actual book that is being read in the play. The husband and wife find each other through a sort of voyeurism that only literature can offer. The sexual conversation that takes place on the stage is also a way for Conchita and Palomo to ignite their passions. It’s sex through a third person who is not physically present at that moment, who in fact has become as fictional and evanescent as the story being told through the book. The lector becomes the embodiment of literature, of art, and he is as desirable and desirous as only art can be. And of course he offers possibilities for this couple to communicate in the same way as art offers possibilities through the interrogation of reality. The lector becomes one of those bridges in which land crosses water and opposites meet. The couple’s desires resurface and what seemed impossible is no longer impossibility. We brought the audience with us; they were consumed in this relationship through the world of art, through the play.

Julian Acosta (Juan Julian) and Adriana Sevan (Conchita) in Nilo Cruz's Anna and the Tropics, South Coast Repertory, California, 2003. Photo: Ken Howard.

EM It’s about a discovery of self, but at the same time you can chart the play on a sexual level, in terms of how people—particularly men, but women as well—have to embrace the female inside them. And if they can do that, they come to another level of consciousness, not just in terms of living in the world but also in their relationships with women. It’s really looking at ideas of machismo, but taking men and women together on a very deep journey. I’ve never seen that in a play before. Palomo makes the biggest journey: he goes from being the most macho guy, with a wife whom he’s not really into anymore and his girl on the side. He doesn’t want to talk about these things or to confront what it is when his wife changes, or what this other man has done for her. And then he asks her to teach him, to show him what it is to love like that, to know her like that, to surrender his armor, his masculine identity, and become one with her, and even change places, be her. That is so profound. And John is really taking Palomo there. It’s something that the audience senses. The number of people who talk to me about this, who write to me about never having seen that before in a movie or a play, that kind of challenge, a man discovering the female self—

NC I was interested in investigating that in this scene, how to enter the female landscape and what you get from it. I find that male sexuality, especially the kind that we usually see, that we’re trained at, is very masculine. Even women sometimes are taught about sexuality through this male perspective. This play is actually doing the opposite, allowing the woman to really look at her sexuality and explore it and change the way that a man looks at sexuality.

EM Of course, it couldn’t happen if Juan Julian didn’t already have that knowledge himself and could help her go there. I think he actually falls in love, so he goes to another place with her as well. At first he’s the teacher, if you will, the leader who helps her love in a new way, but she responds by taking him someplace.

NC I find that writing is all about going into this female landscape: it’s about surrendering and letting the story take its own form and not manipulating it. Male sexuality is often a form of manipulation instead of a dance, but sexuality should be a dance, I think, between two people. This play allows for that dance. But sometimes that dance is even better if it goes into a female energy because that allows you to go into deeper places. Writing should bring us in touch with both the male and the female in us, and then there are times we should move away from anything that might seem corporeal. In some cases a male writer might reject the female in him, and that usually happens when the writer feels too vulnerable and he becomes self-conscious. But it’s precisely this vulnerability that I’m interested in. It is this state of being completely naked and there is a sense of nonexistence, because you drop all masks or walls, any kind of carapace. It’s in this plane where all of a sudden you don’t recognize yourself or what you are doing, because you enter the void and you let the writing take over. It is quite frightening at times, because you no longer dictate what is going to happen. The only way to go about it is to surrender, to have the patience that a woman has when she carries a child in her womb. You can only be a vessel for this particular life that is growing inside you. And when the child is born, you realize that it doesn’t even resemble you. Likewise, the play doesn’t resemble the initial idea you had or the story you were going to write. What has come out is something completely different. But isn’t that what happened in the first chapter of the Bible? Mankind changed what the divine had planned. That’s the perfect example of our first attempt in the creative process.

EM You have always understood women on an exquisite level.

NC Maybe it has to do with the fact that in the first few years of my life, in Cuba, I was brought up by three women: my mother, my grandmother and my older sister. They had a lot to do with my life. I was born on October 10, an important date in Cuba’s history, it’s El Grito de Yara, when one of Cuba’s leaders shouted, “We will end slavery in this country!” The moment I was born my father said, “Ah! We’ve got a patriot here.” And my mother said, “You’re not going to guide him in that direction!” She wanted something else out of me. It was my mother who, when I was in my late teens, said, “You’re a writer,” and she gave me a typewriter.

EM She’d been watching you.

NC It’s all about human behavior. That’s something that interests me in my work: observing human behavior, which is full of action. It’s not about an idea.

EM That’s how you remind me of Chekhov. And Lorca, and Tennessee Williams.

NC Well, Chekhov was surrounded by women all the time. So was Tennessee Williams. And Lorca, with his mom and his two sisters. These are men who were very connected to that female energy. Look at the power that Chekhov’s sister had on him, and even much later, when Olga Knipper moves into the house after he dies, you could still feel how strong the sister had been in his life. It’s curious. It’s a kind of learning that you can’t explain. It’s beyond you, it’s in the blood, it’s in the system. It’s like culture.