Anna in the Tropics Book

"Everything in life dreams. A bicycle dreams of becoming a boy, an umbrella dreams of becoming the rain, a pearl dreams of becoming a woman, and a chair dreams of becoming a gazelle and running back to the forest."



Nilo Cruz is the greatest poet the American theatre has produced since Tennessee Williams. And, like Williams, Cruz's women are beautifully drawn and realized. Lastly, no playwright has captured the steaminess of sex like Williams until Cruz burst upon the theatrical scene.

Anna In The Tropics is set in 1929 in a Cuban-American cigar factory where cigars are still rolled by hand and "lectors" are employed to educate and entertain the workers. The arrival of a new lector is a cause for celebration, but when he begins to read aloud from Anna Karenina, he unwittingly becomes a catalyst in the lives of his avid listeners, for whom Tolstoy, the tropics, and the American dream prove a volatile combination. Nilo Cruz transports readers and audiences with the power of his language, leading us to the depths of his characters' passions.



Cruz's play is a play for voices; it highlights the transformative powers of literature on the human mind and soul, and the unstoppable nature of progress in both people and business. The simple, essentially uneducated employees of a cigar factory in Tampa, Florida's Ybor City in 1929 are introduced to an unfamiliar, exciting world when their new lector, who breaks up the day's monotony by reading books and poetry aloud, Juan Julian, reads to them from Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

This sets off a chain of events that forces the characters to re-examine their lives and their outlooks on the world. Conchita, unhappily married to the unfaithful Palomo, begins an affair of her own (mirroring Anna Karenina's) with Juan Julian. Marela truly loses herself in the story to the point of neglecting much of the real world around her. The factory's owners, Santiago and Ofelia, are inspired to develop a new cigar, but they're facing trouble from one of the workers, Cheché, who is slowly buying up portions of the factory by covering Santiago's gambling debts. Cheché is steadfastly determined to end the tradition of the lector and modernize the entire operation.

The battles between reality and fantasy and tradition and progress are played out as to mirror the struggles of the characters in Tolstoy's novel, with spoken passages used to further illuminate the play's events. Cruz is quite successful in documenting the transformation of the unassuming workers into more worldly, adventurous figures this way. And, as he's infused the script with plenty of light-hearted comedy, he's able to smooth over many of the play's rougher edges.



However, there are problems with Cruz's script as well. As beautifully written as this script is, at times, it seems too calculated, too perfect. Also ACT II starts out with an extremely erotic and steamy scene, but as the act progresses, the passion that consumed two of the characters seems to peter out and much of the eroticism is lost as we focus on less interesting characters.

In the end, Cruz has given us an exotic, beautifully written, if a little plot heavy, slice of Chekhovian drama sprinkled with some magical realism. Recommended. 4.5/5