'Anna in the Tropics' seduces with poetic dreaminess
By Michael Phillips

The Nilo Cruz play "Anna in the Tropics" is a charming ode to infidelity, great literature and a good smoke. Set in 1929, in Ybor City outside Tampa, Cruz's drama has wafted its way onto the stage of the Victory Gardens Theater. Earlier this year it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, which sets up all sorts of false expectations of Meaning and Stature most plays have no interest in meeting, let alone exceeding. In that regard "Anna in the Tropics" is like most plays. It's modest and apolitical, especially by the standards of Cruz's earlier work.

Yet it's pleasurable. It holds you. Director Henry Godinez's Midwest premiere has a couple of genuine ringers in its cast, as well as a nice ensemble vibe. The production's emblem of desire lies in the demurely tormented eyes of raven-haired Charin Alvarez, who plays Conchita, the factory owner's daughter, who falls in love with the charismatic lector, or reader, murmuring Tolstoy in her ear.

Cruz has fastened onto a wonderfully nostalgic historical tradition for "Anna in the Tropics." In Cuba, Florida and elsewhere, through the early 20th Century, lectors were paid to entertain the factory workers. Building on centuries of oral storytelling, not only did the lectors increase productivity; they served as a window onto a literary world.

As "Anna in the Tropics" begins, Ofelia, the factory owner's wife, and Ofelia's two daughters await the seaport arrival of the new lector, Juan Julian. Ofelia's husband, Santiago, does not believe in either lectors or romantic literature; Santiago's half-brother, Cheche, is hurting and alone — his wife ran off with one of the factory's readers.

The younger daughter, Marela, is romanticism incarnate: She is bats about Juan Julian ("Let me look at the picture again, Mama"). It is Conchita, however, who sees the lector both for what he has — looks, a fine voice, an air of tantalizing detachment — and what he can do to take her mind off her husband's own infidelity. As Juan Julian reads Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," everyone within earshot falls under various spells.

Cruz writes with a disarming blend of prose and his trademark poetic dreaminess. He sets the plot in motion quickly and well, and then lets the poetry take over. The vulnerable Marela says of her half-uncle, the cuckolded Cheche: "He needs to listen to another love story and let the words make nests in his hair, so he can find another woman." Conchita, we're told, slipped into her husband's mouth "like a pearl diver."

Two lines later, she says her husband's words "lingered in the air like a zeppelin." It's hard to believe that "Anna in the Tropics" represents a decrease in the number of similes per act compared to Cruz's earlier plays, among them "Two Sisters and a Piano," but there it is.

At the same time, Cruz isn't afraid of resorting to potboiler devices. Twice, characters just happen to overhear key conversations, and near the end, when the fateful pistol is first brandished, the parallels between "Anna Karenina" and the Cruz play become more and more heightened, or obvious, depending on your point of view. On at least two levels, however, this play just plain works. It's a day at the beach, in terms of its shameless romantic appeal. And when he's not overcrowding things, Cruz can hand an audience a poetic image that hangs in the air just so, before disappearing. The Victory Gardens production has two terrific performances in its corner. Alvarez, whose distinctively smoky voice really is something to hear, captures a full and touching range of conflicted desires. As Ofelia, Sandra Marquez makes for a zesty, witty matriarch, snappish one minute, sentimental the next. At the beginning when Alvarez and Marquez await the lector's arrival, along with Sandra Delgado's ingratiating if insistently perky Marela, you feel as though you're looking at an old photograph — an image of undefined longing.

The role of Juan Julian may be missing something on the page: He's more passive than active. The play could use another Act 1 scene detailing the lector's presence and romantic influence in the factory. Dale Rivera's solid enough in the role, but he's not yet bringing anything surprising to it. (Jimmy Smits will take on the role in November when the play opens on Broadway.) The rest of the cast members — Ricardo Gutierrez's Cheche, Gustavo Mellado's Santiago, Edward Torres doing double duty as the cockfight impresario and Conchita's husband, Palomo — fare quite well, with some especially forceful encounters percolating between Torres and Alvarez.

Not all the staging flourishes come off. When the love-starved uncle puts the moves on young Marela, the skies go red and the Afro-Cuban drums come calling. It's corny. And director Godinez takes a risk in holding back on the actual onstage cigar-smoking until a key scene in Act 2. I understand his reasoning. But I also like the smell of cigar smoke. This lovely little play, of all plays, benefits from atmosphere you can see literally hanging over the actors' heads.

Chicago Tribune
Octubre - 2003