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Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize-Winning "Anna in the Tropics" Creates World of Complex Passions in Berlind Theatre Opening

Donal Gilpin

There's something that Anna Karenina said and I keep repeating it to myself, "If there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts,'" Conchita tells her disaffected husband early in the first act of Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz's lyrical 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama.

Set against the backdrop of a Tampa cigar factory in 1929, Anna explores, in all their poignant beauty and anguish, several of those kinds of love: a longtime married older couple, a husband and wife in their thirties facing infidelities and diminished passion in their relationship, a young woman infatuated with a debonair older man, a rejected husband festering with anger.

In a star-studded production opening McCarter's brand new Roger S. Berlind Theatre, Mr. Cruz, in collaboration with director Emily Mann and a superb ensemble cast, has created a fascinating world on the edge of change. It is a world of Cuban immigrants and their dreams, a culture of cigars and mysticism, of cockfights and magic spells, of lectors (readers) and listeners susceptible to the transformative power of literature.

The catalytic element igniting conflict and driving the play forward, is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, read by the lector Juan Julian. Lectors, traditionally hired by the workers not by management, occupied important positions in Florida cigar factories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reading news, essays and classic literature for the entertainment and education of the workers.

The opening scene introduces vividly the essential forces that drive this drama. Three men stand on stage left, betting, quarreling and drinking. They cast ominously long shadows on the back wall as they cheer on their birds in the violent throes of a cockfight. As the lights cross fade back and forth, the men become more deeply embroiled in the gambling and wrangling over financial matters.

Meanwhile, on stage right, in counterpoint, are the three principal women of the play, Ofelia (Priscilla Lopez) and her daughters, 32-year-old Conchita (Daphne Rubin-Vega) and 22-year-old Marela (Vanessa Aspillaga), immaculately dressed in white and off-white, at the seaport awaiting the arrival of the new lector on the boat from Cuba. The women express their hopes and feelings. They discuss the importance to their lives of the literature that this lector will bring to them. Mr. Cruz establishes deftly and strikingly here the strength of these finely drawn characters, the female energy of the play and the inauspicious clash of values with the male characters.

The arrival of the lector Juan Julian (Jimmy Smits) – suave, erudite and elegantly attired in a white suit, white shoes and a Panama hat – with Anna Karenina in hand, quickly brings the play's major conflicts to a head. The reading of Tolstoy's masterpiece on passion, love, fidelity and adultery strikes a resonant chord with all of the characters in this drama.

As Juan Julian explains, "Tolstoy understands humanity like no other writer does," and though Marela may be the most visibly affected by the power of the lector's reading – "When Juan Julian starts reading, the story enters my body and I become the second skin of the characters" – she is not the only one transformed by the literature and drama of the experience.

Though welcomed by the factory owner Santiago (Victor Argo), Juan Julian meets immediate hostility from Cheche (David Zayas), Santiago's bitter and ambitious half brother whose wife abandoned him to run off with a previous lector. As romantic attraction between Julian and Conchita grows, Cheche finds an ally in Palomo (John Ortiz), Conchita's jealous husband.

Cheche brings to a head the conflict between tradition and modern technology when he introduces a cigar-rolling machine into the factory, a machine that would, conveniently for Cheche's purposes, eliminate any need for a lector or any possibility of a lector's being heard over the noise.

Cheche's anger and frustration rise. The relationship between Juan Julian and Conchita continues to develop, and Conchita's marriage with Palomo struggles for survival. Meanwhile Santiago and Ofelia are encountering marital difficulties of their own, and Marela suffers in her unrequited adoration of the lector.

Though traditional in structure and theme, this character-driven drama rises to poetic heights of colorful richness, rendering its principal figures and their struggles with a memorable subtlety and intensity. There are moments in this spellbinding production – the ritual christening of a new cigar brand, for example, as the whole family passes the cigar around, samples it and reflects – when a door is magically opened for the audience to observe an extraordinary world that exists no more.

Ms. Mann has assembled a topflight cast of seven captivating, distinguished performers. Mr. Smits, of L.A. Law and NYPD Blue television fame, is the big-name star here, but Anna is clearly an ensemble piece. Despite his imposing size and stage presence, not to mention his focal role as the lector and controlled charismatic characterization, this Juan Julian does not dominate the proceedings.

Every individual in the family is crucial. Not unlike the characters of Chekhov's major works, these figures all take on lives of their own, becoming fully three-dimensional, thoroughly human and sympathetic as they struggle to work out their destinies.

Ms. Rubin-Vega, the original Mimi in Rent on Broadway, creates a particularly moving and focused Conchita in the frustrations of her life as a factory worker, in her ongoing marital broils with Palomo, and then later as the story of Anna Karenina changes her life.

Ms. Lopez's Ofelia provides another dynamic presence and a riveting characterization as the matriarch of the family, watching the travails of her daughters, protecting her husband from despair and their relationship from destruction, while at the same time taking a hand in calming the dissensions in the factory. "We have to keep our feet on the ground and stay living inside our shoes and not have lofty illusions," she warns.

Ms. Aspillaga's Marela injects an energetic, youthful and often comic note into the proceedings, especially in the first act, as her girlish infatuation with Juan Julian and her romantic immersion in the world of Anna Karenina subject her to a certain amount of mocking humor. As the mood turns darker in the second of two acts, Ms. Aspillaga reveals a deeper side to this character in her tortured, shattered affections.

As the flawed, aging patriarch, Mr. Argo's Santiago is strong and engaging, evoking a nice balance of humor and compassion, while Mr. Zayas as Cheche admirably embodies the villain's role with appropriate force and menace, but not without a certain richness and fullness of character. Even Cheche, difficult as it is to feel any warmth towards him, makes his case persuasively and wins at least our understanding, if not our sympathy.

Mr. Ortiz's Palomo becomes increasingly central to the core issues of the play, as his superficial macho behavior and indifference towards his wife turn to jealousy and anger, then into something much more complex, approaching an understanding of their relationship and the sort of love that they are reaching towards.

Ms. Mann's production brings Anna poignantly and colorfully to life. The set design by Robert Brill – consisting of a diagonal wood-slatted wall of the cigar factory, bare light bulbs and a rotating fan hanging down from above – with carefully nuanced lighting by Peter Kaczorowski and costuming by Anita Yavich, in mostly whites, creams and beige, make for a simple, rather bare, setting for the action.

It is a testimony to the magic of the language, the performances and this shimmering production that Ms. Mann is able to create the remarkable world of this play with only seven actors, so little set and few props. The intimacy of the 360-seat Berlind Theatre, one-third the size of McCarter's 74-year-old Matthews Theatre, contributes significantly here with its concentration of seats, all in one area without balcony or boxes, all within relatively close proximity to the stage.

As Anna renders on stage its nostalgic vision of a world on the edge of change, McCarter Theatre Center also embarks on a new era, with the Berlind Theatre offering Ms. Mann and her colleagues an exciting new world of theatrical possibilities. Joining his director and his intrepid characters in setting out into new territories is the playwright himself, who, with a Pulitzer Prize and this production headed to the Royale Theatre on Broadway in November, has burst into the mainstream of public attention as a major voice in twenty-first century American theater.

Anna in the Tropics runs through October 19 at McCarter's Roger S. Berlind Theatre, 91 University Place in Princeton. Call (609) 258-2787 or visit www.mccarter. org for information.