literature stirs the emotions
by
Douglas Messerli
Nilo Cruz Anna of the Tropics / produced by
OpenFist Theatre Company, performed at the Atwater Village Theater / the
performance I attended was on May 5, 2019
The
Anna of Nilo Cruz’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna of the Tropics is Tolstoy’s tragic figure Anna Karenina. Yet
Cruz’s play overall seems more like a Cuban-version of a Chekov work—a sort of
post-modern cut-up (Cruz studied with the great experimental Cuban-born
playwright Irene Maria Fornes) of The
Seagull and The Cherry Orchard with
a dollop of Three Sisters thrown in.
The family business of these characters—Santiago
(Steve Wilcox), his wife Ofelia (Jill Remez), their daughters Conchita
(Presciliana Esparolini) and Marela (Jade Santana), along with Santiago’s angry
half-brother Cheché (Antonio Jaramillo), and Conchita’s husband Palomo (Javi
Mulero)—is cigar-making, the old fashioned way, rolled by hand, a process we literarily
witness several times throughout this play.
Even from the very beginning of Cruz’s
work, we cannot help but notice tensions as Santiago and Cheché bet on cockfights,
with Santiago, the small factory owner, losing his heavily to his half-brother,
and then desperately asking for a loan with an agreement to pay it back by carving
the amount and his own name into Cheché’s shoe. Cheché’s wife has previously
left him, and we can guess why.
This family, moreover, is rolling its Cuban
cigars not in Havana but in the 1929 Ybor City, Florida, a neighborhood of
Tampa, with the Depression, we all know, a year away. Even family members perceive
that the famed cigars they are creating are losing out to cigarettes (fags)
smoked now by most of the movie stars. In short there is a sense of doom
already hanging over their entire enterprise. They live in a past that is no longer
relevant in the decaying American climate.
Suddenly, the romantic heroine’s
passions and liaisons leaps from the cold Russian landscape into the humid factory
in which they are entrapped. As the summer in which they are working grows
hotter, so to do their emotions, as the handsome reader Juan fans the flames
with his story-telling skills, resulting eventually in a sexual tryst with Conchita
about which her philandering husband quickly becomes aware.
The men are suddenly less important in
the mother’s and two daughter’s lives, and their macho attitudes begin to make
demands on familial relationships. Santiago, somehow (we never quite know)
finds enough money to pay back his debt, and tries to regain control of his
small patriarchally based business by throwing a celebration, replete with rum,
lanterns, and an announcement that he is creating a new blend of cigars to be
called Anna Karenina, using his youngest daughter Marela, dressed in a mink
coat and Russian hat, as the model for the new brand. Surely there is something
slightly incestual about his sudden attentions.
She is delighted, but her new costume
and her natural beauty also attracts the disappointed and unstable Cheché, who, after desperately trying to regain control
of the failing family business by introducing a machine which might take over
the cigar rolling, angrily stalks away only to return and rape his half-niece.
Marela, shocked by the experience, now
becomes the frigid Anna, wearing her heavy coat even in the tropical climate in
which the family must labor.
Palomo confronts his wife Conchita about
her affair, which she explains has only helped, in bringing love back into her
life, to reconfirmed her love for her own husband by allowing her to feel more
as a sexual equal. In a strange twist of story that Cruz only hints of, Palomo demands
that she describe all her feelings when she is sexually involved with Julian,
suggesting a kind of obsession with his rival, which, in turn, hints at possible
homosexual feelings. Even his wife wonders about his continual interest in his
rival’s sexual attractions.
To reveal just how Chekhovian Cruz’s play
is, the tragic-stricken survivors remain determined to keep their traditions.
With no lector now in view, Palomo offers to continue reading Anna Karenina to the workers, thus
further linking himself to Julian, finally taking over his role and perhaps his
sexual allure to both the women and himself.
Director Jon Lawrence Rivera has brought
this obviously ensemble-based cast to move in patterns that might even suggest
a dance, entering, exiting, and returning together to work and play by using
the entire Atwater Village Theater space. And scenic designer Christopher Scott
Murillo has created a set that alternates between a sweat-house factory, a home,
and a kind of cathedral (reinforced by the shifting colors of the lights by
lighting designer Matt Richer). As for the costumes (by Mylette Nora), who can
ever forget Marela in her heavy black coat in a world which the other figures
dress in light whites?
Finally, I have to salute artistic director
Martha Demson and the collaborative Open Fist group for continuing to produce
such innovative and challenging theater.
Los Angeles, May 6,
2019
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May
2019).
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