Posted on Sun, Sep. 26, 2004 Cruz control BY CHRISTINE DOLEN cdolen@herald.com For Nilo Cruz, words conjure worlds. So it's no surprise that when seven actors gather at the Coconut Grove Playhouse to read through his Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics, Cruz summons them into an Ybor City cigar factory, using vivid imagery to unlock the door to the past, to passion, to the intertwining of lives and literature. ''Close your eyes,'' Cruz murmurs to the men and women seated around the table in the bare rehearsal space. ``Visualize the house. The factory. The climate. Is it moist? What is the quality of the light?'' Cruz is guiding this cast back to 1929 and into a world of his own creation, one that has transformed him into the country's most celebrated, most produced Cuban-American playwright. But it isn't only as the author that Cruz has returned to Miami, the city that became his own when his family arrived on a Freedom Flight from Cuba in 1970. He has come back to the part of the world where Anna in the Tropics was born at New Theatre in Coral Gables two years ago, back to the place where a performance by José Ferrer ignited his desire to forge a life in the theater, back to a different kind of challenge: For the first time, Cruz is staging a production of the play that changed his life. Suffused with warmth, humor and theatrical lyricism, the play (which previews at the Grove Tuesday-Thursday and opens Friday) resurrects the tradition of the lector, a reader who enlightened and entertained tabaqueros (tobacco workers) as they hand-rolled hundreds of cigars in Ybor City's steamy factories. In choosing to read Leo Tolstoy's romantic, tragic Anna Karenina, Cruz' lector becomes the catalyst for passion, change and tragedy. Commissioned by New Theatre in 2002, awarded the Pulitzer in April 2003, Anna in the Tropics has largely consumed Cruz's life over the past two years, including a Broadway run that lasted only a few months. He premiered two other plays (Beauty of the Father and Lorca in a Green Dress) during that time, but both scripts were written before the Anna mania hit. Yet the chance to return to the play as a director, even with the time-intensive demands that come with the job, was something Cruz didn't want to pass up. ''I said yes because this is where I grew up, and this theater had such an impact on my life,'' says Cruz, the first Latino playwright to win drama's highest prize. ``I went to the box office in 1982, didn't even know what was playing. It was José Ferrer in The Dresser, and it was an epiphany. I knew I wanted to be in theater.'' Cruz often directs readings of his plays but hasn't staged a full production since directing A Park in Our House at San Francisco's Magic Theatre in 1995. As a director, he says, ``I'm not a dictator. I'm a democrat. . . . A play is a map for us to get somewhere. It's not getting from one place to the other but how you get there.'' At the same time, he says, ``I look at the text as if it were a musical score. The director is the conductor. You cannot allow a violinist to go off on a riff. The music must be respected.'' Six of the seven actors in Anna have already been in several rehearsal rooms with him as playwright, and they've found the experience here genuinely collaborative. ''Nilo brings his vision to the table, but it's not something conceptual,'' says Adriana Sevan, who first played Conchita (the married woman who finds both the lector and his love story compelling) at California's South Coast Rep in 2003. ``He can empty himself of what he knows . . . and show an astounding willingness to make discoveries.'' Onahoua Rodriguez, who first played Conchita's dreamy younger sister Marela opposite Sevan, says Cruz adjusts his directing style to suit each actor. Miami actor Carlos Orizondo created the role of Palomo, Conchita's unfaithful husband, in the world premiere of Anna and is returning to the part at the Grove. But familiarity, he says, doesn't make it easy. ''You have to shed the choices you made before. That's not easy, because your body wants to react in a certain way,'' Orizondo says. ``Nilo is really pushing us to find the moments between the lines.'' Cruz' bubbling ideas are also inspiring veteran actor Gonzálo Madurga, who's again playing family patriarch Santiago, a role that was created for him. ''He's so full of imagery. I think he could write two more plays using these ideas,'' says Madurga. ``What I did before was the first step; now, I can go deeper.'' Actor Jonathan Nichols, a Hialeah High grad, has played Palomo but is now playing Juan Julian, the lector who arrives from Cuba and changes everything. This is his third production of a Cruz play, and though both men have strong personalities (''I'll fight him if I have to, then he'll say yea or nay,'' says Nichols), he feels an affinity for Cruz's work. ''He has the semantics of an actor. Life is about beats, moments, looks, a glance, a breath. He understands that,'' says Nichols, adding, ``I love Nilo the playwright. He's given language [back] to the American theater.'' Teresa María Rojas portrays Ofelia, the vivacious matriarch in Anna. Rojas, the woman who mentored Cruz as he was learning his craft in her Prometeo troupe at Miami Dade College, finds his growth as a director ``magical.'' ''He has focused on a very fine, delicate feature of our culture,'' she says of the lector tradition. ``My great-grandmother was a tabaquera. Once, [Cuban liberation leader] José Martí read for them. Nilo rescued that for us.'' The one non-Latino cast member, Andrew Hamrick (he plays Santiago's half-brother Cheché) is also the only actor who hasn't worked with Cruz before. But long before he got the call to come to Miami, he went to see the South Coast production and came away stunned. ''It was the greatest play I've ever seen, a classic I hadn't heard about,'' he says. ``I will always carry that with me, like when you see The Seagull or The Glass Menagerie for the first time. It's haunting, timeless, universal.'' Once the production is open here, Cruz will travel to other cities where his best-known work is being done. After that, he's determined to get back to doing what he did before Anna in the Tropics altered his world. ''I love this play and the recognition for it,'' he says. ``[But] I want to move on to other stories.'' Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic. http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/performing_arts/9753818.htm return to Cuban Cigars home page |
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