"I've often wondered how one play gets to Broadway and another, that's equally good or better, does not. I'm still not sure." So asserts playwright Nilo Cruz, whose play "Anna in the Tropics" bowed on Broadway at the Royale Theatre, Sun., Nov. 16, marking Cruz's Broadway debut. "Anna in the Tropics," which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for drama, is only the second play ever—Robert Schenkkan's "The Kentucky Cycle" was the first—to garner the coveted dramatic award without a New York production. Now on the Main Stem, it's enjoying enthusiastic audiences across the ethnic-racial spectrum, Cruz reports.
"I believe it's a well-made play and very American. It's a universal story about immigration and the conflicts between wanting to assimilate and maintain one's cultural traditions," continues the affable 43-year-old Cuban native, who has lived in the U.S. since 1970, when his family immigrated to Miami. Cruz is chatting with us on the phone from his publicist's office.
"The play is also about the impact of art," he adds. "The main character is Anna Karenina [Tolstoy's famous heroine], a fictional figure who serves as the play's catalyst."
"Anna in the Tropics," set in Tampa, Fla., circa 1929, tells the story of hard-working Cuban-American immigrants who spend their days manufacturing cigars by hand. The high point of their dreary lives is listening to a Cuban émigré read to them (such men were called "lectors") from "Anna Karenina" while they work. This lector (Jimmy Smits) is an educated and sensual man whose presence evokes their frustrations and disappointments, and their lives begin to echo those in the Tolstoy novel. "Anna in the Tropics" is a lyrical and poetic play that brings to mind not Tolstoy, but Chekhov and Williams.
"Lectors were very much a part of Cuban-American culture and I was interested in these men from the time my father talked about them when I was a child," Cruz says. "What fascinated me was the fact that the Cuban-American workers paid for these readings out of their own pockets. They wanted to be educated. They loved poetry and novels.
"I initially thought I'd set the play in the late 1800s. I wanted to document the experiences of Cuban exiles in this country at a time when they were trying to liberate Cuba. I was hoping to draw parallels between the experiences of Cuban exiles then and now. But that did not work. It was becoming a historical play, with more political issues than I wanted to deal with.
"However, once I decided to set the play in 1929, just when the tradition of lectors was coming to an end, and tell a personal story, as opposed to a political story, it all came together," he remarks. "In fact, it became much stronger and the social politics are still there."
The creative turning point was determining what novel the lector would be reading, Cruz notes: "Once I decided it would be 'Anna Karenina,' the events started flowing. Then the trick is to allow the characters to tell their own story. I never start a play with a fixed plot and I don't know how it'll end. It rarely ends the way I think. I start a play with a character; in this instance, it was the lector who comes to Tampa, Fla. My editing process is mostly about cutting out all the elements that I've superimposed on the play."
Although "Anna in the Tropics" is clearly Cruz's most high-profile project to date, he has seen his work steadily developed and produced over the last 15 years, in New York at the Public Theater and New York Theatre Workshop, and at such regional theatres as McCarter Theatre Center (Princeton), South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa, Calif.), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Alliance Theatre (Atlanta, Ga.), Studio Theatre (Washington, D.C.), Coconut Grove Playhouse (Miami), Victory Gardens Theater (Chicago), Children's Theatre Company (Minneapolis), and Salt Lake Acting Company, among many others. His new play, "Beauty of the Father," will open at Miami's New Theatre this January.
Like many artists, Cruz has central themes and subjects. "Many of my characters are strong women. I've had many strong women in my life, from members of my own family to my mentor, Maria Irene Fornes. And my themes frequently deal with the power of art, sensuality, and the loss of innocence."
No Fear
The son of a shoe-store owner, Cruz always had his sights set on a career in entertainment; from the outset he wrote. He attended Miami Dade College before heading to New York to study with the aforementioned Maria Irene Fornes at a playwriting lab she was heading. When Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel ("How I Learned to Drive"), who heads Brown University's playwriting program, asked Fornes to recommend students who had writing potential and might be interested in earning their M.F.A. degrees at Brown, Cruz was tapped.
"I had never completed my undergraduate degree," Cruz marvels even in retrospect. "Still, I had done a lot of reading on my own. I was especially interested in Latin American novelists and had read many books by Isabel Allende, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez. I got into Brown and I graduated with an M.F.A. I loved the experience because we were encouraged to experiment."
Still, the benchmark in his artistic development occurred early on in his studies with Fornes "when she said to me, 'You've found your voice.' " He adds, "A voice is that intangible muscularity that defines a work."
When Cruz graduated from Brown University, he began the submitting process and, within short order, one of his plays was picked up and produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. He has 10 finished plays under his belt and each one has been produced somewhere, he says.
"If I were not a writer, I think I'd be a painter," he notes. "I'm not painting now, but I do create little boxes, not unlike the work of Joseph Cornell [an eccentric artist who designed small boxes and stored various related miscellany in each box]. Creating these boxes helps me with the composition of whatever play I'm working on."
Cruz is optimistic about his future. His Broadway debut and, especially, the Pulitzer Prize are opening many doors. There are even nibbles from Hollywood. And with that newfound success come the pressures and the loss of privacy, Cruz concedes. "But, no, I don't fear failure, no more than I ever did in the past."