OTR Comment - February, 2004

The worst you can say about this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, is that it’s not a great play. It may well be a good play—it has quite a few redeeming if not admirable traits of intention and craft—but structurally it is unsound, its characterizations ring false as often as they ring true, stylistically it is reactionary to an almost nostalgic degree, and thematically it is vacant.

So what’s wrong with these folks on the Pulitzer committee, comprised this year of Newsday’s Linda Winer, and Bruce Weber of The New York Times, among other practicing and emeritus journalists? Is this the best play they could find? Is this the best our culture could provide? The problem, and the problem with the American theatrical landscape right now, is that the answer is yes.

I.

For those who have not read the published script, or seen it yet at the Royale Theatre (having opened on Broadway in November after it had already won the Prize—an anomaly in the Pulitzer-for-Drama tradition), or seen the same production previously this fall at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, or in its original incarnation at the world premiere at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, the story of Anna in the Tropics is as follows:

The time is 1929, and Juan Julian, a suave “lector” from Cuba, played on Broadway by Jimmy Smits of L.A. Law- and NYPD Blue-TV fame (applause most nights when he makes his crisp, white-suited entrance upon the stage before nary a line is spoke), arrives to work at a cigar factory in Tampa, where he begins reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to an extended family of poetically susceptible cigar-rollers and -stuffers. Everyone is affected to some significant degree by his story—either by the infectious qualities of Tolstoy’s prose, or by Juan Julian’s unflappable suavity, or perhaps a combination of the two. Two sisters, Marela and Conchita, fall in love with him. Conchita’s husband, Palomo, is disconcerted to find himself aroused in his jealousy, and by play’s end seems to be acknowledging some degree of homosexual attraction to the lector. And Cheché, the girls’ uncle, whose wife ran away with the previous lector, nearly assaults the young Marela, then instead opts to shoot Juan Julian in the penultimate scene whilst the lector is in the midst of reading Tolstoy’s description of Anna’s husband’s cowardly opinion of dueling.

And here is the play’s most obvious fault: Cheché is the play. He is the most active agent, he makes the climax occur; he ought to be the play’s main character, or a highly developed antagonist, the way things are constructed and were we to care at all about his and Juan Julian’s fates—but he’s not. Playwright Cruz keeps Cheché’s story obscure, a shadowy, internal affair, perhaps because his struggle is primarily with memory—his wife’s infidelity; and so Juan Julian is merely a reminder, a symbol that must be killed not for itself but for what it represents. 

This all makes fine sense, but not necessarily fine drama. To witness a murder in the climactic act of a drama when we have not been privy to the precipitating struggle will strike the audience as senseless, a random act. And nihilism does not seem to be the point of a play that is so old-fashioned in most other regards. We are meant to feel pathos, surely, or so the supporting structure implies (a lyric kind of epilogue, for example, laments the loss of the lector and all he may—or may not—have represented). But instead we feel cheated. We are not even bewildered, we have watched the play at such a remove.

And so the plot—and any kind of dramatic force that plot can impart—is really just a clothesline connection of scenes, some quite satisfying on their own. The best is an intense exchange in the first act wherein Conchita, her heart open to life’s disappointments—and possibilities—by her daily dose of Tolstoy, confronts her husband Palomo about his mistress, only to realize that she too must take a lover if she is not to die emotionally. The worst, in the same act, is a sentimental sketch wherein Santiago, the owner of the cigar factory and the patriarch of the family, confesses the extent of his gambling addiction to his wife, Ofelia (ironically named because she is perhaps the sanest character in the play). He asks her if, along with all the money he squandered over the years, he has “lost” her too; to which Ofelia replies, in a moment characteristic of Cruz’s broad sentiment, clutching her husband’s face to her bosom, “If you had lost me, I wouldn’t be here. If you had lost me, I wouldn’t be by your side. How can you say that you’ve lost me!” (End of scene.)

And we never return to the question of Santiago’s gambling, nor the question of their relationship. These are not questions, the playwright is saying. Which is why the audience may find themselves questioning of their own accord, despite the loveliness of the lines, this and other scenes’ inclusion in the play.

*

Just as the best of these scenes appear like the occasional sparkling bead along a tenuous string, so the language within these scenes is often quite poetical, if not startlingly so. Cruz’s work seems to descend most from the work of Tennessee Williams (himself a Pulitzer Prize awardee in 1948 and 1955), often to a fault, so well-wrought—and often overwrought—are his heroines; and so stiltedly constructed are his male characters. But perhaps more reminiscent of Williams is Cruz’s imbuement of the conversational dialogue of his characters with what, for lack of better words, might be called the “poetical” or “lyrical.” Ofelia tells her daughter Marela at one point (it could be any point in the play, so unjointed are these poetical asides): “Men marry their cigars, my dear, and the white smoke becomes the veil of their brides.” This has come just seconds after Marela’s near-visionary pronouncement 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.” Startling language, surely, somewhat confusing but infused with an intuitive poetic sense, and therefore refreshing to hear on a Broadway stage—or any American stage these days—where the grand literary gesture, verbal and otherwise, has all but succumbed to the modern bromide of “accessible” language and behavior. And yet dialogue is not poetry, but poetically inflected; and poetical dialogue must serve the drama first. Language spoken onstage that is divorced from the mind and heart that speaks it is counterfeit, and vain. And unconsciously, perhaps, the audience will suspect they are being cheated—treated, perhaps, to the author’s words, but cheated of the characters’. Cruz muscles his way again and again into the audience’s sight-lines, instead of conjuring the necessary illusion that characters are capable of speaking for themselves.

As I’ve said, the play’s other major fault lies in its male characterizations. From the outset Cruz is telling us that men and women are very different: Santiago and Cheché (and the actor who will play Palomo, incarnated initially and puzzlingly as the “local gamester” Eliades) are betting on the cock fights; while simultaneously, conveyed via split-scene, the women wait down at the dock in erotic anticipation for the arrival of our male ingénue, Juan Julian. From this frantic start there is already an imbalance of treatment: Marela and Conchita are already evincing some very keen needs—for escape, love, etc.—revelations that immediately begin to elucidate their characters for us, engendering in the audience a sense of alignment and empathy. But in the men’s scene we learn little more than rudimentary characteristics (Cheché is stingy, Santiago is addicted to gambling, Eliades can crow like a rooster), and a crude plot device that ultimately proves useless.

Santiago, despite his brief aria concerning the eroding effects of addiction, disappears for most of the drama. Cheché’s characterization continues apace as broad and obvious, his various interactions painting him solely as a cranky, stolid, ultimately murderous lout. And even Palomo, despite that promising glimpse of ambiguity in his character, remains a kind of sounding board in his exchanges with Conchita, prompting her more eloquent flights of emotional rhetoric with lines like: “And what do you want me to say?” And: “Are you trying to start a fight?”

Juan Julian, the lector, as perhaps he was intended, is an unreal character. Like Feste the clown in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, he is the prick to the other characters’ kicks, a kind of omniscient trickster. And indeed, the play’s Broadway/McCarter director, Emily Mann, develops in her staging this concept of Julian as a creature of fancy, who, like the books he reads aloud, exists at once in the literal plane and also in the dimension of fantasy, as he lurks in the background of many scenes in which he is not physically present, an ephemeral but potent influencer of the lives he and his books are invading. He is a symbol of art, and on a deeper level the libido, that the United States—or the titular “tropics” of Tampa, anyway—may very well find too “hot” to conscience.

Lamentably, the text does not sustain or develop this metaphor, and Juan Julian comes across mainly as a Williamsesque stud, a Latino Kowalski with no life or soul of his own, and a symbol of no one thing in particular except perhaps nostalgia—for Cuba, for continental literature, for uncomplicated adolescent fantasies of sex. We may even feel, as those two gunshots ring out from stage left, that like Cheché we would also like to dispatch nostalgia from the scene, in order to get at what is really going on.

II.

So what happened? How did a mediocre play receive the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama?

The quick answer is that all Pulitzer Prize-winning plays are mediocre (beginning, perhaps, with the first award, in 1918, to Jesse Lynch Williams’s—no relation to Tennessee—profoundly entitled play Why Marry?). Mediocrity seems to be the common thread in the Pulitzer patchwork of plays that tend to ask an easy question—of life, of the meaning of the stories these plays illustrate—and then answer it seamlessly. Plays like David Auburn’s Proof (Pulitzer Prize winner, 2001) and Donald Margulies’s “Dinner With Friends” (2000) spring immediately to mind, with their bourgeois concerns, television aesthetics, and ninety-minute running times. And even more laudable plays, like Wit by Margaret Edson (1999) and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned To Drive (1998), do little more than titillate and unnerve, or in the case of Wit intelligently grieve. (When I saw Proof some years back, an audience member to my right, whilst applauding vigorously at the final fade-out, turned to her companion and asked, “Is it over?”) Playwrights of obvious artistic excellence—and influence—such as Maria Irene Fornes, Mr. Cruz’s former mentor at International Arts Relations’s (or INTAR) Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory, a national program to “stimulate and develop writing abilities of Hispanic playwrights”; or Wallace Shawn, or Adrienne Kennedy, or Charles Mee, to name but a few—none of these playwrights have been recognized by the Pulitzer committee. And why? Because their work is too “difficult,” too challenging to the mainstream audience, not “accessible” enough: in short these plays make one think, and disagree—above all interact, and thereby become part of the drama themselves, and not simply passive viewers allowed the pleasant daydream that the proscenium is nothing more than a very large TV screen.

Occasionally a play of great merit and impact is recognized by the committee—a Kushner or an Albee, a Miller and a Williams, an O’Neill, crash through this dense net of lesser talents—and these plays achieve what the Pulitzer is perhaps aiming for all along: plays of broad appeal and proven accomplishment that, because they are both literary and popular, achieve the best of both worlds: populist art, and therefore deserving of a journalist’s award. The Pulitzer aims to be the quintessentially American award, and it has sometimes hit the mark. But sadly, in the last ten years at least, no such plays have arrived on the scene.

And yet, something may be happening, some change, some mutation in the Pulitzer criteria, or perhaps in the American theatre at large. Last year’s prize-winning play, Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks, along with Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics, are plays by non-Caucasian authors about non-Caucasian characters and experiences. What’s even more notable is not that these plays are so exceptional in and of themselves, but that they are so conventional.

Ms. Parks, rocketed to prominence, at least in the theatre world, fifteen years ago with her experimental, Beckett-via-George C. Wolfe style (Imperceptible Mutabilities In The Third Kingdom; The America Play), achieved Broadway and Pulitzer fame last year with a tale of two eponymous brothers in a dingy bedsit apartment, pungently reminiscent of ‘70s Sam Shepard. Her youthful individuality has apparently become denatured through years of artistic assimilation (or maturation, depending on your take), and made “accessible” to the “average” audience. Like Cruz, she retains some vestigial verbal flourishes, but her often pretentious grabs at symbolism squash the very naturalistic inanities meant to befriend her middlebrow audiences, and the ultimate gunshot (what is it with gunshot-climaxes and the Pulitzer Prize?—how American!) is, like Anna in the Tropics, merely ugly and stupid, not tragic, as the play’s structure intends. For all that, and more, it’s a better play than Cruz’s.

But why the migration, if it is a change at all, from the white-bread-play to the minority-play? The reason lies not in the Pulitzer criteria, I don’t think, but in the larger landscape of American theatre, where the constraints (perceived and real) of a market economy, strangulated government funding for the arts, and a general recession have combined to promote most the new plays that serve hackneyed and obvious (read: “accessible”) agendas. And the tragedy for our culture right now is not that plays like Anna in the Tropics are being made, but that so many artists in the theatre these days think that this is what a play is, what a play should be, all that the theatre is for.

Let us speculate somewhat on the creation of this play, with the caveat that we know nothing of the personal seeds of Cruz’s inspiration.     

There is no government funding for playwrights. Not for individuals, anyway, applying as free agents; one must apply with the sponsorship of a theatre company, the more well-known the better, and receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, for example, through the purse-pinching intermediary of Theatre Communications Group, or TCG, an arts agency whose mission statement is to “strengthen, nurture, and promote the professional not-for-profit American theatre,” whilst also happening to publish plays (like Anna in the Tropics, for example—as well as the magazine American Theatre). These NEA/TCG grants pay for a six-month-long residency at the sponsoring theatre, to “develop new work and become an integral part of the local community” via some significant amount of community-type outreach programs with the playwright and his plays—and more importantly the “social” issues of his plays—as a touchstone. A playwright from Chicago who happens to be gay and often writes plays about gay youth in Chicago, will conduct workshops and readings and audience “talk-backs” with high school students in (you guessed it) Chicago. A disabled woman provides a likewise resource for disabled students at a theatre in San Francisco, for example. For this residency playwrights receive $25,000. There are twelve of these fellowships awarded each year.

New Theatre of Coral Gables commissioned Anna in the Tropics of Mr. Cruz, a playwright whose published biography describes as “one of this country’s most produced Cuban-American writers.” Most play commissions are separate from residencies, and, without the help of the NEA, usually carry a purse of anywhere from $500 - $5,000. And this money has not been derived from last season’s profits—not-for-profit theaters are not very good at making profit—but rather from the NEA through programs other than the playwrights’ residency program, or the Kennedy Center, or other federal and state agencies, and occasionally from corporate or private donors, all of whom want to know that their money is going to a “good cause.” A good cause, in the theatre, in its most accessible definition, is not an individual playwright, unless he or she is already famous, but a good “social” cause: a play about Cuban-American cigar-rollers in 1929 Tampa, for example.

A quick glance at their website (www.new-theatre.org) will you tell you that “New Theatre produces plays that focus on issues of social and humanistic interest.” That “humanistic” designation is an escape hatch—purposefully vague in order to allow for the requisite, and debt-patching, re-productions of New York’s hits, such as Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery and Conor McPherson’s Irish drama, The Weir (both part of New Theatre’s 2001-2002 season, along with Margaret Edson’s Wit and a previous Nilo Cruz play); but the meaning of that word “social” is clear.

New Theatre anticipates, and wafflingly refutes, some of the public perception of their identity: the website clarifies that they are “not a Hispanic theatre,” though they take pride “in having produced a number of plays by Latino playwrights.”

This is not to unfairly criticize New Theatre, or any of the number of theaters like it. There is good reason for a theatre in Coral Gables to want to speak for and to the Latino community; and there is a long and valued tradition of “social” or political drama in this country. What we seem to have lost is the political drama that incites with its insight, if you will, that stimulates rather than anesthetizes its audience, that questions rather than purports to answer social dilemmas—or side-steps the issues altogether, as in Anna in the Tropics. And it is the Soviet-style funding of only the easily palatable—and easily “pitched” in applications written before the fact—“social” play that encourages playwrights, and the theaters that encourage playwrights, to write so conventionally.

The issue of government funding (that old saw) aside, there are marketing reasons why a theatre these days will choose the obviously “social” play over the more personal, idiosyncratic story (plays that often achieve greater social relevance via the paradox of their subtle peculiarity): It is easier to sell a new play by a new writer if the play is “about” something: “about” the experience of migrant workers, “about” inmates on Death Row, “about” the NYC police department—even “about” cheerleaders in southern California. Such plays stand the best chance of garnering attention in the press in the weeks leading up to performance, and the play’s encapsulable raison d'etre makes every producer sleep sounder at night for laying out his money in the first place: it is an “important” or “serious” play, because it is “about” this issue. A play’s engagement with the fashionable issue has become not only a selling point, but the sole purpose of serious drama.

And theaters, and the individual artists who comprise a theatre, have mistaken such dramatic palliatives as the real thing. Call it fashion, or conditioning, or a closing of the mind. This is what audiences want, what they will go to the theatre to see—i.e., what they will pay for—and what papers will preview and critics review. So it must be how it is: the pseudo-social, the pseudo-political play, has become the new normal, telling our still mostly white, upper-middle-class audiences what they already know (or nothing at all) on a given social topic.

III.

How shameful this condition is!

“We can’t change it,” say the theaters. “It’s money! We have none! Our season is Shakespeare, A Christmas Carol, Proof, Anna in the Tropics, and if funding falls into a place, a new play about single mothers in Afghanistan that promises to be very ‘important.’ There’s a war on! There’s a recession! How else can we do things if we hope to be around next year?”

Well, one can pray for institutional courage. Courage of conviction, bravery of choice—attributes that used to in large part describe the artistic soul: there are no artists in charge of the theaters anymore! Only complacent culture-clerks, curators of nostalgia and panderers to elitist whimsy. Fear has become the pole star of the decision-making process at theaters in New York City and all across this country—“how can we earn enough to be around next year?” (remember that excuse, that mantra)—and fear retards change. Without change, any art form decays into diversion and inconsequence. In this regard, the theatre world is no different than the ecologies of film and television—only the magnitude of money changing hand differs.

Because Anna in the Tropics could have been a great play. And maybe a yet-to-be-written play of Mr. Cruz’s will achieve greatness. But this play, with greater expectations, could have embodied with more skillful technique questions as to the American culture, and its stultifying—if nor murderous—effect on the unabashedly different, in art and in heritage. It could have questioned the audience’s own ignorance and half-acknowledged hostility towards literature, and theatre—anything that does not instantly make plain its own worth in monetary figures. Instead this play pretends insight on a unique “social” experience while merely delivering second-rate melodrama (the closest this play comes to addressing a social issue is Cheché’s attempt to modernize the factory with cigar-rolling machines—a red herring of plot that is quickly thrown back into the morass—and this despite a lazy reference in the play’s epigraph to the demise of lectors as the “end of a tradition”). The worst that can be said of Mr. Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is that it gives our age exactly what it’s asking for.

But shame on the Pulitzer committee, too, for being so blind (they do not have to give an award each year); for bestowing its laurels on another conventionality, and thereby aiding and abetting the illusion for the “average” audience member that this play is the pinnacle of the art form. It is not. It is not midway up the slope.

IV.

I do think that in the current generation there will be one or two (or more) men and women of genius who will shake things up somewhat, in delivering an electric shock to that perpetually revivable corpse of Theatre. The popular theatre is always dead, and should be so, because like us it’s only human, a creature of fear, and laziness, more often than generosity and keenness of spirit, and insight. But when the time allows and the stars align with talent, a few brazen personalities will shock the artist-bureaucrats into remembering that a new theatre must remind us what it truly means to live, to see life in all its irrational mystery, to look beyond ourselves and scratch our heads in wonder, not just at our species, but at the artist who has somehow managed to bring back to us a glimpse into the abyss, to rouse questions that were sleeping in our souls, without deigning to insult us with his answer. He knows, as we know, that the real questions in life can not be answered on the stage.

Chris Anstey is a freelance drama critic.