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| (Eric Gutierrez) and (Claudia Vazquez) in Anna in the Tropics. Photo credit: Donald Songster. |
By Ed Rampell
One of the best things about works of art is that they can transport you far away and long ago, such as to Tampa, Florida, 1929, like in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics. I’d thought that all of the Cubans living in the Sunshine State were, like the playwright, refugees from Castro’s Cuba. But Holy Desi Arnaz!, muchacho, was I ever wrong. According to Anna in the Tropics, which is at the Sierra Madre Playhouse, Cubans had migrated to Florida long before Fidel and Che ever marched out of the Sierra Maestra Mountains and into Havana and history.
This drama is about Cubans working in a family-owned cigar factory near Tampa, who tamper with boredom by hiring lectores to read aloud to the mostly illiterate workers as they roll tobacco, etc., for hours on end. Who’d a thunk it, in this day and age of TV or computers in the workplace? I had also never heard of this long lost profession, which preceded audio books by a century or so. You learn something new every day (especially when you go to the theater).
Instead of merely relieving employee ennui, the young, dashing Juan Julian (played with palpable panache by Eric Neil Gutierrez) adds sizzle and sexual tension as the new reader in town, who chooses Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina -- from which the play’s title is derived -- as his first book. When he arrives on the boat from Cuba, the repressed Marela (TV veteran Vanessa Marquez, whose roles include Nurse Wendy Goldman on ER) literally wets herself.
Julian’s steamy recitations of Tolstoy’s racy Russian romance enthralls the female workers, but causes dissension among the factory’s males. He becomes enmeshed in the proletarians’ sexual entanglements, with the philandering husband Palomo (Serafin Falcon) and his wife, the spurned, smoldering Conchita, played to the hilt by Claudia Vazquez as a wife seeking some payback, pleasure and reconciliation. The reader also comes between her virginal sister, Marela, and Cheche (angrily portrayed by Arturo Medina), who yearns for modernization of the cigar manufacturing processes and Marela. The lectore’s passionate reading of Tolstoy’s novel about infidelity, illicit love, etc., mirrors the play’s plot and incites the instincts of the cigar rollers. (In this case, Sigmund Freud is wrong, and a cigar is not just a cigar.) Perhaps listening to lectores was the 1920s’ equivalent of cruising Internet porn in the office?
The tensions in act one explode in the second act, as the drama devolves from a character study into sexual violence and gunplay. The drama becomes more War and Peace than Anna Karenina. Alas, this is unfortunate, as I would have preferred to have continued exploring the interior lives of the Cuban transplants, instead of watching the latent become manifest, with the type of action Hollywood flicks are fraught with. But what do I know? Cruz won the Pulitzer Prize for this play.
In any case, Anna in the Tropics is an insightful rumination on how the written -- and spoken -- word affects us, the most erotic work about literature and libido I’ve seen since 2008’s film, The Reader. These are also the most passionate tobacco rollers to appear onstage since Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Corky Dominguez ably directs the ensemble cast, with effective evocative lighting by Stephanette Isabel Smith. And Sierra Madre is an exquisite Alpine village with parrots and stunning views, and visiting here enhances the overall theatergoing experience found at this out-of-the-way mountaintop Playhouse. Yes, Virginia, there is culture in the San Gabriel Valley.
(Anna in the Tropics runs through Nov. 13 at the Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd., Sierra Madre, CA 91024. For more info: (626) 355-4318; http://www.sierramadreplayhouse.org/)
