Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, said Sigmund Freud (supposedly), who himself smoked fifteen or so Cubans a day before dying of mouth cancer. But in Nilo Cruz’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 play, “Anna in the Tropics,” which has been remounted with mixed results by Remy Bumppo under the direction of Laura Alcalá Baker, cigars symbolize all kinds of things, from capitalist commodity to the male, um, prerogative to an older, slower lifestyle, to religious burnt offering. If anything, there are just too many meanings drifting like smoke through the tobacco-scented Florida rolling factory where this tale of Cuban immigrant cigar makers in the 1920s takes place. In the end, the proliferating metaphors and messages never quite add up, creating an overall experience that promises more than it delivers.
I should note that this is a minority opinion. The night I saw the show, the audience responded rapturously to what seemed to this critic its overripe narrative, flattened and clichéd characters, and often over-the-top acting. And then there’s the violence the play does to “Anna Karenina,” the classic Russian novel being recited to the workers by the factory’s lector, or professional reader. Tolstoy’s dense, morally complex work, which gives the play its title, is shrunk to the dimensions of a Harlequin Romance, igniting passion among the listeners but inspiring little wisdom or insight.
“Anna in the Tropics”
Still, the audience was clearly enjoying something, so let me list the production’s strong points: director Baker’s smooth pacing and effective blocking; Lauren Nichols’ lovely, lived-in, multilevel set; and Rigo Saura’s and J. Sebastian Fabál’s blend of dance and music (including Tina Muñoz Pandya’s jazzy accordion licks), which provides a joyful, playful counterpoint to the sometimes talky scenes.
Some of the performances are noteworthy, including Charín Álvarez as the edgy, strong-willed matriarch of the play’s cigar-making dynasty; Eduardo Xavier as the villainous half-brother who wishes to mechanize the factory, thus embracing an efficiency-mad modernity that has little room for the leisurely rituals of cigar culture; and Arash Fakhrabadi as the fresh-from-Cuba lector whose golden voice relieves the female rollers’ boredom, while his suave manner gets under their skin.
“Anna in the Tropics”
On the other side of the ledger, we have a plot that’s a poetically enhanced soap opera, involving a factory-floor love affair culminating in an act of violence that’s predictable without being really plausible. Most of the characters are stereotypically hot-blooded Latins, played too often with telenovela-style histrionics, who spend their days listening to “Anna Karenina” and mentally translating it into steamy, simplified kitsch. The adulterous affair at the center of the play, triggered by the novel’s tragic tryst, is treated as a liberating, guilt-free escapade. The female character who drives the relationship exudes a sexual rapacity, vindictiveness, self-absorption and single-mindedness that verges on toxic masculinity and has little to do with the 1920s. Her seduction scene degenerates into a strikingly cold and impersonal explicitness that’s more pornographic than romantic, knocking the production off balance.
Perhaps the biggest problem in this play is the history it omits. In reality, worker-paid cigar-factory lectors mixed literature with nonfiction and current events, striving to inform as well as entertain their listeners. One result was that cigar makers as a group were very active in the early twentieth-century labor movement, and their unions were known for their militancy and internal democracy. By ignoring this political and social context, and focusing entirely on the characters’ sudsy sex lives, the work undercuts itself.
“Anna Karenina” is an exacting, challenging, in-depth portrait of a particular world at a certain moment. “Anna in the Tropics,” while sporadically fun to watch, in the end captures only our own era’s comparative superficiality.
“Anna in the Tropics,” Remy Bumppo Theater Company at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont, (773)975-8150, RemyBumppo.org, $32-$40 with discounts available. Through March 19.
