Source Citation DatabaseCritical Essay on Anna in the Tropi.docx

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 inits 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.

Source Citation DatabaseCritical Essay on Anna in the Tropi.docx

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Source Citation DatabaseCritical Essay on Anna in the Tropi.docx