Playwright smokes out a cigar-centered tale
When Nilo Cruz was writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning play ''Anna in the Tropics," he began each day with several yoga poses. Then he lit up a cigar. ''I've never been a cigarette smoker," he says.
A Cuban-American, Cruz has taken to apologizing for his writer's ritual. Censorious strangers have told him that puffing while writing a play set in a cigar factory romanticizes -- perhaps even encourages -- a health hazard.
But deep breathing and quick puffing, however contradictory, helped the writer create the paradoxical world of ''Anna in the Tropics," a story of love, loyalty, and passion that opens tonight at the SpeakEasy Stage Company.
Cruz, the first Latino playwright to win the Pulitzer, was 9 when his family fled from Havana to Miami in 1970. He uses the history and politics of his native and adoptive countries as a backdrop for his plays, but he is more concerned with the character and texture of Cuban-American culture.
The play is set in Ybor City, a section of Tampa that was founded by late 19th-century Cuban nationalists and makers of hand-rolled cigars. Known in its halcyon days as ''Little Havana" and the ''Cigar Capital of the World," the immigrant enclave flourished as a factory town through the early part of the 20th century, then went into decline.
In 1929, on the eve of the Depression, Ybor City, as Cruz imagines it, is teeming with tensions between old and new worlds, and is chafing within the confines of an exiled community that belongs to neither.
As the play opens, Ofelia, the formidable matriarch of a factory-owning family, waits with her two daughters for the arrival of Juan Julian. He has been hired as a lectore (reader) to recite newspaper stories and novels to the mostly illiterate tabaqueros as they roll and cut cigars.
The Cuban practice of hiring lectores is said to date to the country's indigenous Taino Indians and was nurtured by the country's strong storytelling tradition. In Cuba, education has been revered from colonial times through the Castro regime, Cruz said.
Cruz learned of the lectores from his father. ''This play took a long time to write, and it went through many incarnations," he said in a phone interview from his home in New York City. ''But what I've loved about it the whole time is the idea of these lectores, these men who were hired by workers to read literature to people who couldn't read and write."
In ''Anna in the Tropics," dapper Juan Julian begins by reading ''Anna Karenina," and it enthralls many of the women. ''We learn things," says Ofelia's daughter Marela. ''And the words he reads are like a breeze that breaks the monotony of this factory." Marela pines for Juan Julian, as does her sister, Conchita, a married woman who immediately catches the lectore's eye.
Tolstoy's tragic love story of passion, convention, duty, and desire takes place a world away from Florida -- in the wintry, isolated realm of a privileged late-19th-century Russian provincial society -- but it reverberates through the factory, and it changes the characters forever.
''Anna in the Tropics" is a paean to ''the power of storytelling, the power of art, to change lives," Cruz said. It is also a densely textured play, according to Liam Torres, a New York actor of Irish-Catalan descent who plays Juan Julian in the SpeakEasy production.
During the Depression, he said, Cuban cigar factories closed, and the communities around them disappeared from the Florida landscape.
''The lectores were the first ones fired, in many cases, because they were seen as subversive -- almost anti-American, because they were really more about educating and freeing the workers than anything else," Cruz said.
Juan Julian is a romantic figure, and like the playwright, a lover of literature. But many lectores were socialist activists as well, said Cruz.
He was delighted to learn that José Martí, the poet and revolutionary hero who founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, worked as a lectore in Tampa.
Such social and political themes waft through ''Anna in the Tropics," but most of all, Cruz said, ''I wanted to write a love story -- a tragic one."
''In our stories, in our most beautiful ballads, there is an element of romanticizing tragedy," he said. ''It's even in cigar smoking. Some of the most famous cigar brand names, like Romeo y Julieta, which still exists, are named after tragic love stories."
Maureen Dezell can be reached at dezell@globe.com.
"Anna in the Tropics" runs through March 26 at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Roberts Theatre. Call 617-933-8600 or visit www.bostontheatrescene.com.
