NEW YORK · A collision of self-knowledge and dreams leads to tragedy and reconciliation in Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, a revelatory house of mirrors that opened at Broadway's Royale Theatre on Sunday. Theatergoers learned about themselves by watching Cuban-American émigrés learn about themselves by listening to a reading of Anna Karenina.

The 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner, which was incubated and launched at Coral Gables' New Theatre a year ago, is cause for celebration for many reasons. One is that it offers a rare instance when the authentic Hispanic experience spills across a Broadway stage with all the flavor and color that we in Florida take for granted.

But Cruz's tale of lives transmuted by the power of art needs no cultural excuse to justify the standing ovation that greeted the production's Broadway debut. The play, punctuated with hilarity, sweat and tears, proved itself a strong and clear artistic vision, with no asterisks.

Anna is set in a 1929 Ybor City factory where cigars are still rolled by hand, even as mechanization threatens to end a vibrant way of life. Maintaining a tradition from the old country, owners Santiago and Ofelia import a lector to read literature aloud to the workers.

Juan Julian, the charismatic and sensual reader, chooses the tragedy of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's tale of passion and adultery inflames the emotions and intellect of the listeners, whose own lives parallel those in the story: the impulsive young dreamer Marela, her mature sister Conchita, Conchita's unfaithful husband Palomo and Santiago's half-brother, Cheche, whose life has curdled after his wife left him.

Juan and his tale are catalysts that create one romantic relationship, revive another and destroy a third. Sex and passion and love -- sometimes separate, sometimes melded in changing combinations -- swirl around the characters like the omnipresent cigar smoke wafting around the stage.

Like his lector and Tolstoy, Cruz is a storyteller who spins golden webs of plot, character and language into a hypnotic song. Although some of his dialogue is prosaic, his characters often speak unaffectedly in bursts of lyrical imagery, revealing poetic souls that they do not realize they possess.

As the reader, Jimmy Smits makes a solid Broadway debut in a role that makes the most of his charm. But while the lector's role is the linchpin, the show is an ensemble piece with a sextet of first-quality performances -- the first all-Latin cast in a Latin play to appear on the Great Anglo Way.

And in fact, Smits' is not the standout performance. That likely belongs to Daphne Rubin-Vega, Rent's original Mimi, as Conchita, driven to the lector for romance by Palomo's inattention. Her strangled voice and pain-filled eyes rend the heart as she begs her husband to find some alternative mode of loving her.

Director Emily Mann, head of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., which debuted this version this fall, deftly allows the play to breathe. She helps invests these simple people with dignity.

Although Cruz gives Mann all the raw materials, the director doesn't quite maintain the tension and sense of doom that should imbue the final third of the evening. Yet her production does provide a finale that is both shocking and cathartic.

Fuente: SunSentinel
Noviembre - 2003