ANNA IN THE TROPICS [ 1/2] (two and one-half stars)
At the Royale Theatre, 242 W. 45th St.; (212) 239-6200.
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TOLSTOY and Cuban cigars are an intriguing mix. Together they provide the background to Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Anna in the Tropics,” starring Jimmy Smits, which opened last night at the Royale Theatre.
The “Anna,” of course, is Tolstoy’s doom-swept heroine Anna Karenina, and while Tampa, Fla., where the play is set, hardly seems like the “Tropics,” it makes a fascinating title for a moderately fascinating play.
The time is 1929, when the United States was on the cusp of modernity and the edge of the Depression. Outside Tampa, in a place called Ybor City, Cuban cigar manufacturers set up factories, complete with old-country traditions ranging from cockfighting to lectors who read to the workers as they rolled cigars.
It’s a lovely historical concept that Cruz captures for this slender story of forbidden love, which – aptly enough for a cigar factory – goes up in smoke. Gunsmoke.
Juan Julian (the effortlessly accomplished Smits, a TV star and theater veteran) has come as a lector, invited from Cuba by Ofelia (the delicious Priscilla Lopez), wife of the factory owner, and gambler, Santiago (Victor Argo).
Juan decides to read Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” and this tale of passionate adultery becomes a kind of template for the love affair between himself and Santiago’s eldest daughter, Conchita (Daphne Rubin-Vega), who’s locked in an unfulfilling marriage with Palomo (John Ortiz).
Yet the story and its telling are far more Chekhov than Tolstoy. Santiago’s younger daughter Marela (Vanessa Aspillaga) is rejected by Juan, and assaulted by her father’s half-brother, the discontented Cheche (David Zayas).
This is the kind of play where atmosphere is all.
Director Emily Mann, using an almost vestigial, cigar-box setting by Robert Brill, elegantly period costuming by Anita Yavitch, and an impeccable cast, manages to give this fundamentally thin if poetic play a certain texture suggesting weight.
The performances from top to bottom are totally convincing. Smits – stylish, slightly remote, as haughty as an Hispanic Eugene Onegin (how these Russians keep intruding!) – is superb. So, too, are Rubin-Vega as the errant wife, Ortiz as the wronged and puzzled husband, and Aspillaga as a young girl with a fragile heart and a lively imagination.
Should this play have won the Pulitzer Prize? There have been worse winners – and better ones.