Anna in the Tropics

Playwright Nilo Cruz directs his Pultizer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics to stunning effect in Miami at Coconut Grove Playhouse with an assist from set designer Adrian W. Jones. This is Cruz's paean to the power of story-telling, filtered through a bit of the Cuban immigrant experience of late 1920s America. Mainstage audience members are primed as they take their seats before a stage bearing only a single sidelit palm tree silhouetted against dark blue, the tree leaning into the light. The first line rings out as two men, owners of a cigar factory in Florida in 1929, prepare to place another bet on the evening's entertainment: "Cockfights!" So begins a tale of lust, romance and retribution.

Cuban-born Cruz, whose family arrived in Miami in 1970, sets the action in a little-known environment, a cigar factory in Tampa where employees maintain the island tradition of hiring a lector to read novels to them as they work. The lector's choice is "Anna Karenina." Cruz spins his tale from the Tolstoy novel, quoting it, paralleling it, turning it inside out as the new man stirs up longings and resentments among the characters: the owner of the factory and his wife, who runs it; his daughters and a cheating son-in-law, who roll cigars there; and the cuckolded half-American half-brother from the North who owns a piece of the factory and wants to mechanize the struggling business.

Cruz is no stranger to South Florida theaters. Anna debuted in 2002 just a few miles away at tiny New Theater in Coral Gables; it won the Pulitzer the next year, having had only that production. New Theater also has produced his Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams and Beauty of the Father, which Federico Garcia Lorca haunts in more ways than one. Before Anna, the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in its 135-seat Encore Room, had mounted A Bicycle Country, about Cubans attempting to cross the Florida Straits by homemade raft.

As director this time, Cruz here oversees a production in which the designs, pre-curtain to final tableau, reinforce his poetic writing. Jones' stone-beige sets seamlessly become a home, a back yard and, primarily, several aspects of the cigar factory. The actors stand out in white costumes by Ellis Tillman, and lighting by David Lander is evocative without being intrusive.

Six of the seven members of the cast are Cruz veterans. Carlos Orizondo is back in the roles he created two years ago: conflicted as the husband, Palomo, of Conchita (Adriana Sevan) and all insinuating angles as the cockfight gamester, Eliades. The proceedings brighten when Gonzalo Madurga, also retuning to a world premiere role, and Teresa Maria Rojas go at it as husband and wife Santiago and Ofelia, and Cruz has given them one especially warm and funny scene to play. If Jonathan Nichols comes across as less than spellbinding as lector Juan Julian, perhaps that's to keep the focus on the novel, not the reader.

Problematic, though, are two key characters: Marela, Santiago's younger daughter, and Cheche, his half-brother. Marela, played by Onahoua Rodriguez, comes off as an addled escapist, a romantic dreamer and either a resilient heroine or a victim in denial. Cheche (played by Cruz newcomer Andrew Hamrick) is opportunistic and bitter, almost sinister when he makes his daytime entrance right after Marela has described him as "a clown." That doesn't help the audience get a handle on either of them -- and we want to after Cruz gives Marela probably the best passage in the play, one that seems emblematic of the Cruz canon. Speaking to her sister, she insists that "everything in life dreams. A bicycle dreams of becoming a boy, an umbrella dreams of becoming the rain, a pearl dreams of becoming a woman, and a chair dreams of becoming a gazelle and running back to the forest."

The worthy 2002 production at 104-seat New Theatre brought the characters' dilemmas up close to the audience. At 1,100-seat Coconut Grove Playhouse, the dreams have more room to grow.