Anna in the Tropics
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
A Noise Within
Through April 17
Imagine, if you can, members of the UAW or the United Mine Workers of America hiring a reader to read to them while they labor at their job. And not just any printed material — not a gossip rag or a bodice ripper or a third-rate paperback. No, we’re talking good books, well- respected tomes, like Tolstoy’s classic, Anna Karenina. That’s the novel the lector reads to the workers in a cigar factory in Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz’s vital, vibrant 2003 Pulitzer prize-winning drama, now in pallid revival at A Noise Within.
Impossible to conceive of in American workplaces (given the anti-intellectualism of our mainstream culture), storytelling lectors were common in factories that employed Cuban immigrants in the early 20th century. According to an essay by Cruz (which prefaces the Dramatists Play Service publication of his script), these readings were part and parcel of a cherished Cuban tradition. Having a lector was so desirable that the workers hired them out of their own wages. Cuba’s great poet and political activist Jose Marti was a lector in the factories of Tampa in the late 1800s. While most Cuban factory workers were illiterate, many could recite passages from Don Quixote or some other noted work.
Sadly, the custom of lectors vanished, along with the traditional hand-rolling method of making cigars, in 1931. After hundreds of years, the hand-rolled cigar was overtaken by the more efficient technology of the machine.
Anna in the Tropics is set in Florida in a family-owned cigar-making factory around the time that this industrial transition was taking place, in 1929. Santiago (Leandro Cano), the main owner of the business, is an okay guy but he is prone to gambling and drinking. His feisty wife Ofelia (Rose Portillo) does what she can to mitigate the damage of his ways. They have two daughters: the unhappily married Conchita (Tania Verafield), whose husband, Palomo (Matias Ponce), strays, and Conchita’s 10-years-younger sibling, Marela (Katie Rodriguez), a naif who believes that putting cinnamon and brown sugar in water will cause magic things to happen.
Recently, family stability and tradition have been coming under siege from Santiago’s half-brother, Cheché (Gabriel Bonilla) who has been steadily gaining more control of the factory’s finances. This is because Santiago, a compulsive gambler, keeps borrowing money from him in exchange for an increasingly larger share of the business. Cheché wants to modernize the plant, a commonsensical business choice that’s opposed by his brother and sister-in-law and their daughters, all of them loyal to tradition. The macho Cheché has no time for lectors, one reason being that his wife ran off with one. Frustrated in love and work, he keeps eyeing his half-niece Marela, the target of his libidinous cravings.
For the women of the family, the world brightens with the arrival of their new lector, Juan Julian (Jason Manuel Olazábal) who — in addition to a fine form and a sonorous voice — possesses the sensitivity to appreciate the literary works that he reads from.
As drama, Anna in the Tropics is stacked with flawed, passionate characters who drink, fight, love and otherwise live in the moment. The women in particular are aspiring souls appreciative of the poetry and lyricism that literature (in this case, excerpts from one of the greatest romances in Western literature.) bestows on them. And the passions that imbue their lives are dramatically intertwined with a distinguished tradition in decline, about to be bulldozed to extinction by impending industrialization. The love affair that threads through the plot translates into more than one green-eyed monster looming in the shadows, about to devour the present.
Very little of this chroma comes through in this staid, presentational production, directed by Jonathan Muñoz-Proulx. Right from the beginning, where the women stand on a dock, awaiting the new lector, their dialogue comes across as lifeless and flat — exposition to the audience rather than a nuanced conversation between a mother and her daughters. The familial pulse is faint at the start, and it stays that way.
Several actors — Portillo, Cano, Bonilla and Olazábal — are technically proficient, but their skills aren’t sufficient to enliven the evening. Portillo’s spirited turn as a strong, opinionated matron can’t compensate for when Ofelia’s relationships with her husband and children ring false. Cano’s hearty Santiago has presence, but you never forget he’s on stage. Olazábal (who understudied multiple roles for director Emily Mann’s production at the McCarter Theatre Center in 2003) has the requisite aura for his role, but never quite garners the spotlight. His scenes with Verafield’s Conchita emit only tepid heat.
Among the ensemble it’s Bonilla who emerges as most dynamic and on point as the internally seething and dangerousCheché. Yet, the character’s most villainous act is so ineffectually staged that its impact is lost.
Other actors need more direction and haven’t received it.
These problems are compounded by a dark, drab set (scenic design by Tanya Orellana) constructed around a wooden edifice with a staircase that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere (a bedroom, an office?) — we don’t know. Sometimes the actors perch on the steps. The upper balcony stands in for the dock at the marina in Scene 2, and it’s where Juan Julian is positioned to read to people during working hours, but that doesn’t seem enough to justify its dominance of the space. And why would people who dress so gayly and elegantly (costumes by E.B. Brooks) not make more of an effort to beautify their surroundings? It’s a puzzle, much like how and why this lovely play, in the hands of such accomplishedtheater professionals, could fall so flat.
A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m. Sun., 2 p.m., through April 17. Running time: approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes with an intermission. https://www.anoisewithin.org/play/an-iliad-2/.
