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JOHN FLEMINGNilo Cruz did a lot of research for his play about cigar factory workers in Tampa, but he knew his creativity had to bring Anna in the Tropics to life.
NEW YORK - Nilo Cruz didn't want the reality of Ybor City to get in the way of his imagination.
So when the playwright was preparing to write what became Anna in the Tropics, his play set in an Ybor cigar factory in 1929, he decided not to visit Tampa, even though he had a grant to do research there.
"I'd read that the cigar factories had become bars and all that stuff, which is really great because they're preserving the buildings, but I thought it would be better for me to imagine it than to actually go there," he said.
Cruz, 43, who was born in Cuba, raised in Miami and now lives in New York, had been to Tampa once, when he was a teenager, to meet his sister's husband's family. But when he set out to learn about Ybor City, where lectors read newspapers, political tracts, novels and poetry to immigrant Cuban, Spanish and Sicilian factory workers as they rolled tobacco leaves, he did his research from a distance, at the University of Miami.
He obviously knew what he was doing. In April, Anna in the Tropics became the first work by a Latin American playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
In Cruz's play, a lector reads Tolstoy's 19th century novel of adultery among the Russian aristocracy, Anna Karenina, and cigar workers in Ybor find themselves transported, their lives emulating those of characters in the book. Conchita, the married daughter of the factory owner, has a passionate affair with the lector, Juan Julian, newly arrived from Cuba.
The lector represents one of the most fascinating chapters of American history, and it's what inspired the playwright.
"I felt it was important to document this group of people that came to this country and brought many things with them, including culture," Cruz said in November, interviewed in the lobby of the Royale Theatre, where Anna is receiving its Broadway premiere.
"This beautiful tradition of the lector is what drove me to write this play."
Cruz chose to set the play at a time when the lectors, paid by workers, were beginning to be seen as leftist troublemakers by the factory owners. In 1931, Ybor cigar workers struck over the owners' removal of lectors, to no avail. Declining cigar sales during the Depression and mechanization in the factories doomed the tradition.
"The machine was coming into the factory, but the '31 strike was really over the reader," said Gary Mormino, a historian at the University of South Florida and co-author of The Immigrant World of Ybor City. "Radio replaced the reader just as machines replaced the cigar maker. Within a decade, the cigar makers were listening to the World Series on the radio in Spanish."
Cruz immersed himself in the rich political history of Ybor City, but he had to set aside his research when writing the play.
"In the theater it's not interesting to write about geography," he said. "You have to write about characters because they are the ones who carry the story forward. Certainly the history of Tampa was important, and for me to familiarize myself with the place, but I realized at one point that I couldn't create any kind of drama out of just documenting the history of the place, that I really needed to go into characters."
Cruz incorporated a number of passages from Anna Karenina into his play. He likens the impact of the novel on his characters to his experience with great literature. When he was in his early 20s, the "magical realism" of Latin American fiction was astonishing the world with a wave of amazing works led by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
"Reading that book changed my life in the sense that it was the first time I identified with a book and the characters of the book," Cruz said. "And this is what Anna in the Tropics is all about. It's reading a book and the book changing your life.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude was a very important book in my life. Just to encounter the wealth of imagination, the lyricism and those beautiful images. It was transformative for me. I felt like this was the kind of thing I wanted to do in my life, to dedicate myself to perhaps painting that way through the words. That's what Marquez did for me."
Anna Karenina was not always the novel Cruz envisioned to be read in his play. Initially, he thought it might be Zola's Nana, a populist romance and one that was widely read in the Ybor cigar factories.
"At one point I thought the play was going to be more political," he said. "But I felt I'd done that already with other plays of mine. Two Sisters and a Piano is quite political. I thought, no, I'm going to get away from that, and I just decided to go with the power of art, the power of imagination."
None of the Pulitzer jurors had seen Anna in the Tropics, which had been produced only at the tiny New Theatre in Coral Gables in fall 2002. They awarded the prize on the basis of reading the play, which won over two more prominent finalists, Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? and Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out.
Cruz learned of winning the prize on a train platform in New Haven, Conn., as he headed back to New York after teaching a class on playwriting at Yale University. The weekend before, Anna had received the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award, which is given to the best new play produced outside New York.
When Cruz got a call on his cell phone from a man congratulating him, at first he thought it was about the Steinberg.
"So when this gentleman said, "Congratulations,' I said, "Oh, you heard about the Steinberg?' and he said, "No, no, no, you got the Pulitzer Prize, my friend.'
"I flipped out. Immediately there was a barrage of phone calls. The New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, friends calling me. I didn't have enough batteries in my phone. Then I got on the train, and it started snowing, which was incredible. Incredible."
Snow, to Cruz, is inextricably bound up with his feelings about Russia and Anna Karenina.
He also finds meaning in the Tampa Bay area's Russian ties, however tangential. "Isn't it amazing that across from Tampa there's a St. Petersburg and this play talks so much about Russia via the novel? I made that connection much later when I had actually finished writing the play," he said.
Cruz was born in the Cuban province of Matanzas and lived on the island until his family took a freedom flight to Miami when he was 9. His mother and two sisters still live in Miami. He moved to New York in 1988 to study with playwright Maria Irene Fornes, also Cuban American. Many of Cruz's plays - others include Dancing on Her Knees, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams and A Park in Our House - hark back to his homeland.
"I'm interested in capturing the beauty of what I remember as a child," he said. "I think that there's a certain kind of elegance that Cuban people have that I like to capture in my plays. There's a sweetness and a purity that is just the nature of the people."
After winning the Pulitzer, Anna had stagings in Southern California, Chicago and Princeton, N.J., from which the McCarter Theatre transferred its production to Broadway, where the play opened in November. Directed by Emily Mann, the all-Latin cast includes Jimmy Smits, of NYPD Blue and L.A. Law fame, as the lector and Daphne Rubin-Vega, the original Mimi in Rent, as Conchita.
Critically praised before arriving on Broadway, Cruz's play has gotten a few lumps there. His impressionistic, lyrical approach probably is on the delicate side for such a large venue as the Royale. All the previous productions were in small theaters.
He takes some artistic license with Ybor history in order to accommodate the play's romance and a cast of seven. For example, the lector is hired and paid by the factory owner's wife, not by the workers.
There's no doubt that the Pulitzer raised expectations for what is a relatively modest, if lovely, piece of theater. John Lahr, theater critic of the New Yorker, dismissed Anna as melodramatic and said that the Pulitzer jurors giving the prize to an unseen play was "as absurd as giving a restaurant four stars on the basis of its menu."
Coincidentally, one of Lahr's criticisms was that Cruz's story would be better suited for musical theater than straight drama. That's essentially the idea the playwright brought up unprompted in the November interview. "With the love story it has, I think this play should be an opera," he said.
To Cruz, a key aspect of his play is its subtle dissection of machismo among Latin men, exemplified by Palomo, the husband of Conchita. In a remarkable scene, Palomo (played by John Ortiz on Broadway) and Conchita discuss her affair while the lector observes from upstage.
Conchita tells Palomo about her lovemaking with Juan Julian and how they reversed roles: "It was as if I was making love to myself, because he knew what to do, where to go and where to take me."
The sense of complicity among the lovers and cuckolded husband is strangely sensual.
"I think the lector is in touch with both the female and male," Cruz said. "He is the one that brings them back together, Palomo and his wife. Palomo is transformed at the end. He realizes he cannot make love to his wife the way he did before, that he has to embrace the female in him, too."
With mixed reviews, Anna has played to an average of roughly half-full houses at the 1,078-seat Royale, putting a long run in doubt. But it's still a substantial achievement in a commercial environment slow to cultivate ethnic diversity.
"The last time there was a Latino play on Broadway was 15 years ago, and that was not with a full Latino cast," Cruz said, citing Reinaldo Povod's Cuba and His Teddy Bear, which starred Robert De Niro as a drug dealer and ran for 53 performances. "The last Latino musical on Broadway was The Capeman, and that was not a totally Latino cast," Cruz said. The Paul Simon musical was a flop in 1998.
No matter what happens on Broadway, Anna in the Tropics is guaranteed a long life in the United States, thanks to the Pulitzer. The play has been translated into Spanish, and a production is planned in Madrid. Cruz was contacted by Cuban officials interested in staging it.
No Tampa Bay area theater has plans for Anna. Stageworks in Tampa is scheduled to do Cruz's latest play, Lorca in a Green Dress, in April, and the company's producing director, Anna Brennen, met with the playwright in Miami. But Stageworks has no permanent home and limited resources.
"I would like to do it," Brennen said. "The biggest problem is casting. Finding that Hispanic cast would be a challenge. I won't do it unless I can do it halfway decently."
Todd Olson, artistic director of St. Petersburg's American Stage, has an intimate space ideal for Anna and the resources for a suitable production. But he aims to announce the theater's 2004-05 season Feb. 2, probably too soon for the play to be available. While Anna runs on Broadway, performance rights will not be released to other theaters.
Cruz, who expressed surprise at the scarcity of resident professional theater in the Tampa Bay area, will return to the setting of his play in March. The published text of Anna in the Tropics will be featured that month in the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library program "One Community, One Book: Tampa-Hillsborough Reads."
Patrice Koerper, public relations and partnerships coordinator for the library, saw the play in November. She met the cast and gave it gifts from Ybor merchants.
"I was enchanted," Koerper said. "One of the reasons we selected his work for our "One Book' project was because of the role of the lector. We're a library, and here is this wonderful piece about community reading and the impact literature can have on your life. It's also a great piece about our history."
El Centro Asturiano, the old mutual aid society for cigar workers in Ybor, hopes to host a reading by Cruz. After winning the Pulitzer, he was contacted by Willie Garcia, a board member of the society, and the two men became friends over the phone.
Garcia, whose father had a restaurant that served cigar workers, was a consultant to the California and New Jersey/Broadway productions of Anna. Set designers for both shows visited Ybor, as did Smits. La Gaceta, the trilingual Ybor newspaper, supplied a 1929 edition for the lector to read in the play.
"It's a very exciting thing for Tampa, no question," said Garcia, who saw Anna in Princeton. "I think it's a real good representation of the people of that era."
Cruz is looking forward to being in Tampa. "I can't wait to go," he said. "I had looked at historic photos of parties at Centro Asturiano, but when I talked with Willie Garcia, the play became real for me. All of a sudden, all my characters were not characters anymore; they had a sense of history. I saw the play in a different light."