Ceiling fans rotate slowly, stirring the sultry air and casting shadows on the walls of a small factory where cigars are still rolled by hand. Birds chirp in full chorus. And a guitar is strummed in the distance as pink light pours through the shuttered windows.

We could easily be in Havana. But we are, in fact, in Ybor City, Florida -- the Cuban-American exile community -- circa 1929, where Nilo Cruz has set his intimate, lushly poetic romantic tragedy, "Anna in the Tropics," the play that won him the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.

Well before that prize was awarded, Victory Gardens Theater had made "Anna" part of its season. And the gemlike production that opened Monday night under Henry Godinez's sensitive, beautifully tuned direction -- and with a lustrous cast that showcases the extraordinary gifts of Chicago's sadly underutilized Latino actors -- is a fine tribute to this lovely work. To borrow a phrase from Cruz, this is a play bathed in sugar and cinnamon water.

With hints of Anton Chekhov, Brian Friel, Tennessee Williams and the Latin American authors of those ripe fruit-and-spice novels of the 1970s and '80s, Cruz has crafted a story that plays on the classic themes of love, adultery, jealousy and change. And along the way he has opened a window on a culture that has largely disappeared. This is a play that comes streaked with colors and smells, and with passions fit for the opera house. In fact, in its singing, florid language and its forbidden and all-consuming passions, "Anna in the Tropics" has all the makings of an opera.

Two strands of storytelling are woven together from the start. On one side of the stage, three exceedingly pretty women -- Ofelia (Sandra Marquez) and her two daughters, Conchita (Charin Alvarez) and Marela (Sandra Delgado) -- await the arrival of a new lector, the man hired to read novels to the workers of the cigar factories. Dressed in their finest frocks (designer Judith Lundberg's costumes are utterly beguiling), each woman is clearly hoping the man will live up to his photograph and their fantasies. And indeed, Juan Julian (Dale Rivera) turns out to fit the bill.

On the other side of the stage are Ofelia's husband, Santiago (Gustavo Mellado), the owner of the factory, and Cheche (Ricardo Gutierrez), his half-brother from New Jersey, who has some big ideas about modernizing the operation. They are at a cockfight, and the inebriated, free-gambling Santiago gets a loan from Cheche.

The novel that Juan Julian has chosen to read is Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's complex anatomy of adultery -- a dangerously suggestive tale given the tense state of several of the relationships in this extended family. And Tolstoy's subplot -- with its contrasting views of country and urban life -- also strikes a chord. Ybor City may be a world away from St. Petersburg, Russia, but the characters' fire-and-ice dilemmas unquestionably coalesce.

Although Cruz's plot line may be predictable (and a scene between step-uncle and young niece verges on melodrama), his delicate but potent imagery, his understanding of the different forms of love and romantic expectation, and his sense of the heart's willfulness are all faultless.

Godinez, himself a Cuban American -- and a director at his best when dealing with the work of Latino writers -- has cast this "Anna" to perfection. And his actors bring a ravishing luminosity to Cruz's heightened language.

Marquez is radiant and sharply funny as the still-elegant and formidable matriarch. The tiny, wide-eyed Delgado glows with all the innocence and heated imagination of youth. And Alvarez, an actress of magnetic intensity, is a searing presence as Conchita, the unhappy wife who mirrors Tolstoy's Anna.

Rivera is all sophistication and worldly grace as the lector, with the mellow, bearlike Mellado most winning as the gentle father. Gutierrez is all creepiness as the caustic, lonely Checha, and Edward Torres is Conchita's alternately angry and fiercely aching husband.

In one of the play's loveliest scenes, the family celebrates the creation of a new brand of cigar -- the "Anna Karenina" -- and each takes a trial puff that reveals their soul and pays homage to a lost world and a slower, dreamier way of life. It says a great deal when a playwright can write in smoke.

'Tropics' burns with fiery passion

Chicago Sun-Times
Octubre - 2003