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Playwright finds the heritage is the thing
By BABITA PERSAUD, Times Staff Writer
TAMPA -- Two weeks ago, playwright Nilo Cruz catapulted Ybor City to new heights. He made it literature. His play Anna in the Tropics, set in Ybor just before the Great Depression, won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama. But Cruz, 42, didn't craft the play while sipping cafe con leche at the Columbia or La Tropicana. In fact, Cruz has hardly been to the Tampa historic district. "I went to Ybor when I was in my 20s with my family," he said last week in a telephone interview from his Manhattan home. How was he able to write about the city's essence so eloquently? It came through his heritage and through books. Cruz was 9 when his mother, a seamstress, and father, a shoe store worker, fled Cuba. He grew up in Miami, hearing about Cuban traditions, including that of the lector, the person who read to cigar factory workers while they rolled tobacco leaves. "I became fascinated with the lector," Cruz said. Later, he researched the practice at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. He perused archives and books, including Ferdie Pacheco's Ybor City Chronicles. Then, he pushed the research away and let his imagination take over. "I started to visualize the character's face, the clothes, the place where the character lived, the work," Cruz said. "Does he live alone? Is he lonely? I was not only writing about a place. I was writing about people. I was writing about love." So, when Conchita, the cigar factory owner's daughter in Anna in the Tropics, describes her lover, she does it this way: "Our love will be white and pure like tobacco flowers. And it will grow at night, the same way tobacco plants grow at night." Cruz did not always want to be a writer; acting was his first choice. But during a night class at Miami-Dade Community College, his teacher told him: "I don't think you're an actor. I think you're a writer." Thus began a writer's life. His mother gave him his first typewriter. He got a master's in fine arts from Brown University, moved to Manhattan, applied for grants, taught once a week at a graduate workshop at Yale University -- riding the train from New York to New Haven on class days. Cruz drew often from his Cuban heritage. "For me more than anything, it is important to document the presence of Latinos in this part of the world, this part of America," Cruz said. He wrote dozens of plays: A Park in Our House about a Russian visitor to a Cuban household; Two Sisters and a Piano, about sisters under house arrest for speaking out against Castro. "Beautiful," the Wall Street Journal said of Two Sisters. "Lets us glimpse a Cuba beyond politics." His work was performed in playhouses in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Oregon and San Francisco. At workshops and festivals in New York. But never on Broadway. Never in Tampa. Last year, Cruz approached New Theatre in Coral Gables, a 104-seat theater, with nothing more than an idea. "I was willing, very much, to go on faith," said Rafael de Acha, artistic director at New Theatre. At first, the play was going to be called Ybor City. The lector was going to be the main character. Then, Cruz started to think: What would the lector read? He choose Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery in 19th century Russia. Cruz had started to read the 1,000-page novel years ago but never finished. This time he read it all, "through the eyes of the cigar workers," he said. In the novel's margins, he wrote reactions the workers would have to passages -- as if the lector were reading it to them. Soon, he had a plot. Tolstoy's Anna falls in love with an army officer. Conchita falls for the lector, Juan Julian. "The book impacts the cigar workers," said Cruz. "Awakens their passions and their hidden desires." Anna in the Tropics opened at New Theatre in October 2002. Miami Herald theater critic Christine Dolen loved it: "The words of Nilo Cruz waft from a stage like a scented breeze." Anna ran for five weeks at New Theatre, and then Cruz flew back to New York. His attention turned to new plays and his life as a playwright. He continued to receive rejection letters, even up to three weeks before winning the Pulitzer. Cruz is the first Latino to win the drama prize. His Latin friends proclaim: "We won the Pulitzer!" "And I love the fact they said, 'We,"' Cruz said . "I share it with a community for sure." Anna in the Tropics will play at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., in September. Then, it goes to California's South Coast Repertory. Then, Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. Since winning the Pulitzer, Cruz has received calls from Broadway and Hollywood. "Eight," he said. He also received a call from Ybor City. William Garcia, a board member with the 1,000-seat Centro Asturiano, wants to bring the play home. The Stageworks theater company also has joined the effort. "We would love for it to play here," Garcia said. "Our club was built by cigar workers." -- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.
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