Nilo Cruz's smoldering poetic drama, "Anna in the Tropics," pays homage to Tolstoy's classic novel "Anna Karenina." The 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, now playing at Seattle Repertory Theatre, falls somewhere between Tennessee Williams, Anton Chekhov and Frederico Garcia Lorca - Williams for its steamy atmosphere; Chekhov for its complicated character relationships; Lorca for its lyrical language. The mixture, in Cruz's hands, is at best rhapsodic prose and, at worst, a fragmented masterpiece.
"Anna" marks Sharon Ott's final directing turn at Seattle Rep. Ott, who will leave the Rep at the end of this theatrical season, serves up the bittersweet drama with sensitive insight. She understands Cruz's work, having helmed last season's Rep production of his play, "The Name of the Father."
Cruz's lush, evocative language wafts across our existence like a smoky summer breeze. Set in 1929 during Prohibition, the action unfolds in a rundown, family-operated cigar factory in Ybor City - the Cuban district of Tampa, Fla. As the Cuban immigrants struggle to preserve their hand-rolling tradition against the onslaught of modernization, their dreams collide with economic realities. This threat wraps itself around another time-held custom, that of hiring lectors to relieve the drudgery by reading aloud to the workers. Although they can neither read nor write, these factory folks readily quote "Don Quixote" and "Jane Eyre," a testimony to the power of great literature.
When the handsome new lector Juan Julian Rios (Bryant Mason) arrives from Cuba, he begins his literary stint reading Leo Tolstoy's great masterpiece. While the women are smitten with Juan's gallant charms and velvety voice, the men react with jealousy, especially Chechë (Peter Allas), whose wife ran away with a previous lector, and Palomo (Paolo Andino), an unfaithful husband who senses his wife Conchita's (Romi Dias) attraction to the lector.
Although Santiago (John Herrera) owns the factory, his outspoken wife Ofelia (Maria Elena Ramirez) actually runs the show with a very firm hand. She must be strong, since her husband wrestles with drinking and gambling, as well as a recent run of bad luck. Santiago keeps borrowing money from his half-brother Chechë, repaying these loans with shares to the factory.
As the novel unfolds, Tolstoy's words act as a release for some, a threat to others, but life-changing to all. The characters begin to unravel, unleashing a torrent of emotions. The Russian novel ignites passionate and painful fires inside a young dreamer, a forgotten wife and a rejected husband, who all yearn for their own vision of love. Cruz parallels Tolstoy's story of adulterous desire and betrayal with the volatile feelings of the cigar workers. And eventually they become metaphoric fodder.
Mirroring the triangle in Tolstoy's epic are Juan, the lector, and Palomo and his wife Conchita, who is Santiago and Ofelia's oldest daughter. Conchita, beautifully played by Dias with lonely vulnerability and sexually repressed longing, begins an affair with the lector-so she can learn to love again. Their sensuous encounters throb with raw rapture and exquisite shame. Yet despite her adulterous relationship, Conchita still desires her husband.
Andino, as Palomo, embodies a cool-but-fiery machismo virility, especially when he implores Conchita to show him how Juan makes love to her. And Mason, as Juan, infuses his character with a philosophical wisdom and poeticism that is both sensual and noble.
While some of the characters are richly developed, others seem incomplete, like Santiago and Ofelia's youngest daughter Marela. At first Marela overflows with a dreamy innocence and enthusiasm for life. But after she is raped by Chechë, playwright Cruz all but abandons her character.
Still, each family member has moments of poetry and revelation. As he rocks in his creaky rocker, Santiago compares his gambling losses to a line of ants carrying breadcrumbs on their backs, as if they were taking away his pride and self respect piece by piece.
Marela believes that "a chair dreams of becoming a gazelle and running back into the forest." And Conchita wants to cut her hair and plant it under a tree to rekindle nature. Juan describes clouds that look "as though they had soaked up the whole sea." And Ofelia says of literature: "Nothing like reading a winter story in the middle of summer."
Even Chechë finds his poetry when he likens his wife's abandonment of him to a lizard's cut-off tail-still moving, still searching for its body.
Sometimes the characters lighten the mood at the expense of their new homeland, making jokes about American Prohibition and bad dancing. When Santiago decides to introduce a new cigar, the "Anna Karenina," he throws a festive party, complete with contraband rum. A laughing and nostalgic Ofelia throws herself into the celebration, taking the first puff of the new creation.
Hugh Landwehr's fantastic, weathered-looking factory is rich with wood and the promise of aromatics. As it revolves, you can almost feel the cigars being rolled inside. While Peter Maradudin's lighting sets the mood, Steve LeGrand's sound design adds sexy Latin rhythms to compliment the onstage action. And costumer Deb Trout reminds us of a time when men looked even more dashing because they wore hats.
As Cruz's characters get lost in his suspended fantasy, the power of the play diminishes, reduced to a series of seductive snippets-some exquisite, some incomplete-that do not quite connect. You are left waiting and wanting, surrounded by desire.
At one point, Marela suggests that one can always hide behind the light. The light of fires, of stars, the light that reflects off rivers, the light that reflects off the skin. And the light that penetrates through cracks.
In a way, Cruz also hides behind the light. A light that reflects off one of the world's greatest novels.
"Anna in the Tropics" may have fascinating and poetic moments, but ultimately it too languishes between the cracks.
Freelance writer Starla Smith is a Queen Anne resident. Before moving to Seattle from New York, Smith was a Broadway journalist and Tony voter.
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