Grand emotions, savored history and life-changing art swirl through Nilo Cruz's tender, impassioned writing. And since April, those things have also enveloped his life like the sinuous smoke from an aromatic Cuban cigar. It has been an extraordinary year of firsts for Cruz, the Cuban-born, Miami-raised playwright whose Anna in the Tropics secured him a place in history as the first Latino awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama -- and plunged him into a joyous, distracting professional whirlwind from which he has yet to slow down.

IN DEMAND: Nilo Cruz and director Emily Mann at rehearsals of 'Anna in the Tropics' at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J. T. CHARLES ERICKSON

Just in the past month, Cruz says from his apartment on Manhattan's East Side, ''I was at the McCarter Theatre [in Princeton, N.J.] for rehearsals and the play's opening there. I made a speech at the Labor Department in Washington. I visited the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago twice before Anna opened there, and went to California once to see Anna at South Coast Rep. I just got back from London, where I saw Two Sisters and a Piano, and now I'm going to Puerto Rico for a conference. And I'll be in South Florida for the Carbonell Awards,'' where he and Coral Gables' New Theatre, which commissioned and premiered Anna in the Tropics, will get a special award for it during Nov. 10 ceremonies at the Broward Center.

Then comes Broadway, another first.

Cruz's whirlwind began just two days before the Pulitzer was announced April 7, when he became the first Latino playwright to win the ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award, with its $15,000 first-place prize.

Then the Pulitzer brought another first: Though one other play, The Kentucky Cycle, won the Pulitzer before being produced in New York, those who chose it saw its debut production in Seattle. This time, no one on either the drama jury or the full Pulitzer board had seen the sole production of Anna in the Tropics during its 23-performance world premiere run at New Theatre in October-November 2002. Like the lector, or reader, in Cruz's lush play about end-of-an-era cigar-makers in Ybor City, they had only read Anna in the Tropics, only imagined a world spun from the playwright's imagination, research, artistry and luxuriantly evocative imagery.

Precisely three weeks from today at Manhattan's Royale Theatre, Cruz will add another first to his wondrous collection: Anna in the Tropics becomes the first drama with an all-Latino cast by a Latino playwright to open on Broadway.

''If winning this award can do anything, perhaps it will be a permission to embrace this kind of work,'' says Cruz, 43, who has seen three separate productions of Anna open over the past month. ``Now the play has been blessed. The theater is full every night. People want to celebrate the award.''

STAGE POET

Though it's highly unusual for a Broadway-bound, Pulitzer-winning play to appear at a trio of major regional theaters right before its New York opening -- and for all three to get glowing reviews -- it's just one more facet of the Cruz/Anna anomaly. Before April and the Pulitzer, each of the three had committed to its production based on the script, which Cruz continued to hone even after it won the prize.

At the McCarter, where Cruz's plays A Park in Our House and Two Sisters and a Piano were commissioned and had their world premieres, he already had an admirer and colleague in artistic director Emily Mann, herself a playwright.

She chose Anna in the Tropics to inaugurate the McCarter's Roger S. Berlind Theatre in September, she says, because it had ``the smell of a classic play. It was set at the end of an era, in 1929, at the end of prosperity and of an industry. It was a whole lost world. In that way, it was reminiscent of Chekhov.''

As distinctive as Cruz's artistic voice is, theater people hear in it the echoes and perceive the influences of others: the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez; the dramatic poetry of Tennessee Williams; the passion of Federico García Lorca.

''I've always loved Nilo's stage poetry. There's no one else alive who has it. It's Tennessee reincarnated in a lot of ways, but with his own unique voice,'' says Mann, whose much-praised McCarter production will now face another test as it moves on to Broadway. Its high-profile ensemble cast includes NYPD Blue veteran Jimmy Smits, making his Broadway debut; Daphne Rubin-Vega, who originated the role of Mimi in Rent; and Tony Award-winner Priscilla Lopez, who says, ``I'm thrilled and honored and to happy to be part of this. It's so important.''

Smits, who plays the catalytic lector in Anna, traveled to Chicago and California on his week between the end of the McCarter run and the start of Broadway rehearsals, to see the other productions and to support Cruz.

''I feel honored and privileged to give life to the character in this play,'' says Smits, who mixes playfulness and sensuality as he reads passages from Anna Karenina to Cruz's fictional cigar-makers. ``Here you have a play that says something about art and literature. And then you have the whole family drama. I'm always looking for that piece that's not just wearing our culture on our sleeve. . . . It's an insightful [look] into a culture.''

Mann acknowledges, ``I feel a great responsibility. This is a brilliant new American play. If it's done correctly, people will recognize that.''

CALM AMID STORM

The stakes, of course, are the highest in America's commercial theater. Will the New York and national critics embrace Anna in the Tropics or, as they did with The Kentucky Cycle, pounce on Cruz's prize-winning ''mystery'' play? Will it start off strong, as Pulitzer winner August Wilson's operatically scaled plays do, only to have audiences dwindle or opt for the sheer escapism of Little Shop of Horrors or Hugh Jackman in The Boy From Oz? Will Cruz add the Tony Award to his growing collection of honors?

Talk to Cruz, a man who meditates and calmly considers everything, and you become convinced that if anyone can stay relatively sane and the same through this wild ride, he can.

''I was in a state of shock at the beginning,'' Cruz recalls over dinner near New York's Public Theatre, one of several companies that can count itself among his artistic homes. ``With the Pulitzer came so many things. Not just the recognition, but all the other things its brings. . . . It has made my life very public.''

The offers -- for turning his work into movies, for being a featured speaker -- have come pouring in, along with enough money that he has started thinking about getting a part-time place in South Florida, somewhere near the ocean, in part so he can work with theater students in the place where he got started.

But he has learned to guard his time and to say no. Post-Pulitzer, he has stayed focused on seeing another new script, Lorca in a Green Dress, to fruition as it premiered over the summer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; on getting Anna in the Tropics just right; on listening to readings of Beauty of the Father, his newest work, which will have its world premiere at New Theatre in January. After Anna opens, he'll turn to rewrites of Beauty of the Father, a passionate contemporary play about a sculptor, his estranged daughter and the young man who captivates them both.

''I don't want to become a commodity. I'm an artist,'' says Cruz, who lived for several years in a converted sound booth at New Dramatists, a nonprofit New York theater playwrights' development group, while trying to make it. ``That's the choice I made. Not to make a lot of money.''

Fuente: The Miami Herald
Noviembre - 2003