Work and all Play
Nilo Cruz’s play wins the Pulitzer Prize despite great odds
By Gigi Anders

“Life is made of little moments. Little moments as small as violet petals. Little moments I could save in a jar and keep forever …”

—Fictional Cuban-American cigar maker, Marela, 22.

Life may have its sweet little moments, but it also has its big, fat ones. Moments as big and as fat as winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as Cuban-born Nilo Cruz did recently for his lyrical, poetic play, Anna in the Tropics.
“I’m still processing,” says the 42-year-old Cruz, who lives in Manhattan and teaches playwriting at Yale. “It’s incredible. I just went into shock when I heard. I knew I was nominated for the Pulitzer, but I never imagined I would be a finalist because my play was never shown in New York City.”
That Anna won at all is remarkable beyond the fact that until Cruz, no Hispanic had ever won a drama Pulitzer. The two other finalists—out of 25 plays considered by the Pulitzer committee—were heavy hitters Edward Albee for The Goat or Who is Sylvia? and Richard Greenberg for Take Me Out. Both of those plays ran on Broadway (Take Me Out is still running), whereas Cruz’s play had its 2002 world premiere at New Theatre in the relative boondocks of Coral Gables, Florida, a city that’s part of the Greater Miami. None of the five Pulitzer drama jurors, all seasoned theater types, ever saw a production of it; Anna won on the merits of its script alone. (The only other Pulitzer prize-winning play that wasn’t staged in New York was 1992’s The Kentucky Cycle by Robert Schenkkan.) So in the New York-centric world of American theater, the summit where all important national critics flock, people who can make or break a production, Anna stands out even more.

“It’s a highly unnatural act to read a play simply as a reader,” says Dominic Papatola, the chief drama critic of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and a Pulitzer drama juror. “But Nilo blends a distinctively Latin sensibility—magical realism that reads like a dream—with realism, which has its feet on the ground. With that literary technique, the play creates pictures in your head in a way that’s almost unbidden. It’s like taking a warm bath and being submerged in another world.”

Others liked that warm and worldly bath, too. Less than a week before the Pulitzer winners were announced, Anna won the prestigious American Theater Critics/Steinberg New Play Award at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. The award is given to plays produced outside of New York City.

“That speaks very highly of Nilo’s craft and ability to really make something come off the page,” Papatola says. “With his work, you can see it, taste it, smell it. It’s all there.”
What’s “there” in Anna is a group of blue-collar Cuban exile cigar makers living in 1929 Tampa, Florida, in Ybor City. As was the tradition in the old Cuban tabaquerías [cigar factories], the workers, not the owners, paid lectores to read to them all day long as they worked. Lectores read everything from newspapers of the day to classic works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Chekhov and Lorca. In the case of Anna, a new reader comes to town and shakes things up by reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the Anna of the play’s title.
“I hear they still have lectores in Cuba,” says Cruz, who left his native Matanzas for Miami in 1970 on a Freedom Flight with his parents and two older sisters when he was 9. “I love the notion of illiterate cigar rollers quoting Don Quixote and Shakespearian sonnets by heart. They’re like artists—Bohemian. What’s political to me is the personal: the need for culture, the need for literature.”

Cruz means his cigar roller characters and their lector, but off-stage he shares their need. But whereas his tabaqueros are listeners, Cruz is a creator with a strong need to express and be heard. Playwriting is his artistic catalyst. He believes in the mind-body connection and likes to say, “We write from our toes, our ears, our guts, the whole body is a landscape full of memory.” That’s why at Yale, Cruz and his students practice hatha yoga to get ready to write.
“It’s a communion of emotion, body and spirit,” Cruz says, “like an art form. Very complete and holistic. Writing has to function that way. One informs the other.”

Cruz embraces and notices everything, including what people wear. Indeed, in one of Anna’s few stage directions, Cruz writes a note to costume designers: “These workers were always well dressed. They used a lot of white and beige linen and their clothes were always well pressed and starched.”

Having a seamstress mom and spending six months researching cigar-making traditions at Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection account for the authentic feel of the play and its characters. That and Teresa María Rojas, Cruz’s influential, first and very Cuban drama teacher. She directs Prometeo, a decades-old theater program at Miami-Dade Community College. Cruz took Rojas’ classes, beginning in 1982.

“Nilo distinguished himself immediately,” Rojas says. “I knew he was a writer, not an actor. His text stood out for its poetry. I predicted back then that he would win a big prize some day. He’s dedicated. It’s hard to distract him with a party or a social event. All he wants to do is write.”
Specifically to write Cuban-themed plays. While many Cuban Americans have grown up with the cigar culture, for example, it is for many other Americans a fresh discovery. Ed Wilson, for one. He’s the Executive Director of CUNY’s Martin E. Segal Theater, and a Pulitzer drama juror.
“The whole ethos of a lector was absolutely new to me,” Wilson says. “I’d never heard of that before. The play chronicles a way of life and a way of working that has disappeared.”

That elegant and vital snapshot of a vanishing culture is, in part, what made Newsday drama critic Linda Winer, who chaired the Pulitzer drama jury, flip for Anna.
“We felt proud to have it on the list with the other two [contending finalist plays],” she says. “It’s such a luscious play, with rich imagery and a sense of myth and labor history. It takes us to a world we don’t know.”

“The Cuban culture really feeds Nilo’s writing,” agrees New York playwright Stephanie Fleischmann, a close friend of Cruz’s since 1997. The two met in a composer-librettists workshop in New York, where Cruz has lived since leaving Miami, where his family settled. (Cruz is single and has a teenage daughter who lives in California with her mother. Cruz’s father, a former political prisoner in Cuba, sold shoes for a living and died in Miami four years ago.) “I wasn’t surprised at all that he won the Pulitzer,” Fleischmann adds. “To me, he’s an important, inspiring playwright who’s already got a big place on the map. And all his plays are as beautiful as Anna.”

Perhaps, but certainly nowhere as successful or as known. Though Cruz has written dozens of plays since the ‘80s, in the crucible of Broadway, Fleischmann says, “They were, like, ‘Nilo Cruz? Who’s he?’ ”

“Nilo is a very experienced playwright,” says The Seattle Times’s theater critic Misha Berson, another Pulitzer drama juror. “I’ve seen other works of his in playwriting festivals and regional theaters all over the country. One of the things a Pulitzer does unintentionally is remind people that there’s a world of theater beyond New York. What I hope is that winning the Pulitzer isn’t a curse for this play and that it’s given a fair ride, because it’s lovely and kind of fragile, with archetypal, universal characters.”

Rafael de Acha, the artistic director of Coral Gables New Theatre, believes that the best venue for Anna would be a large off-Broadway theater. Broadway’s not a welcoming environment for “sui generis” plays like this one, even with the Pulitzer’s imprimatur.

“You can get a love letter [review] in the New York Times,” de Acha says, “but on Broadway, if it’s not a wildly commercial play like Hairspray or Thoroughly Modern Millie that appeals to tourists and Long Island ladies clubs—it won’t work.”

Cruz isn’t sweating it. For now he’s celebrating his good
fortune and enjoying all the accompanying professional options: In the fall, Anna will be shown at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, New Jersey, then it’s on to the South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, California, and Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater. His latest play, Lorca in a Green Dress, will premiere in July at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Though his life is a dramatic whirlwind, Cruz’s dreams and aims really haven’t changed. “What I want to document,” he says, “is what we as Cubans and Latinos are trying to provide, our cultural gift of art to the Anglo world. We have beautiful, powerful traditions. As a writer and a human being, I want to share them.”