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    A Study Guide for Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics"
    A Study Guide for Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics"
    A Study Guide for Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics"
    Ebook58 pages38 minutes

    A Study Guide for Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 3, 2016
    ISBN9781535818407
    A Study Guide for Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Nilo Cruz's "Anna in the Tropics" - Gale

      1

      Anna in the Tropics

      Nilo Cruz

      2002

      Introduction

      Nilo Cruz first intended to set his play Anna in the Tropics in the 1800s, a time when lectors (readers) played an important role in cigar factories. Cruz, however, reconsidered and decided that a historical account would be too complicated to render dramatically, so he chose instead to focus on the role the lector played in the factories during a time when personal and financial independence were inextricably linked. Speaking in an article by Jennifer Kiger for the South Coast Repertory Playgoers Guide, Cruz states that I decided to write about possibly the last lector in Tampa. The lectors were the first to be fired when the Depression began, so I set the play in 1929. Lectors read novels and news to the workers, who paid the lector directly from their own wages. Cruz also wanted to tell the story of Cubans who fled to the United States prior to the 1959 revolution. These were not immigrants. They were exiles who wanted Cuba's independence, and they would have been killed if they stayed there. I thought it was important to document this part of our culture, says Cruz (also quoted in Kiger). Anna in the Tropics was written while Cruz was playwright-in-residence at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, which first staged a production of the play in 2002.

      Anna in the Tropics portrays the lives of cigar factory workers in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, when a new lector, perhaps the last to ply his trade, is hired. The men and women remain divided in their loyalties as economic hardship and the pressure to abandon old traditions force the owners of the cigar factory to adopt new, progressive manufacturing methods if they wish to stay in business. As the lector reads from Anna Karenina, a novel of adultery set in nineteenth-century Russia, he casts a spell over the workers, transforming their passions and desires through the affirming power of art. That the love they seek may result in a tragic end is ordained as much by the story of the Russian noblewoman as it is by the actions of the workers themselves.

      Author Biography

      Cruz, the son of Tina and Nilo Cruz, was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1961. A staunch opponent of the new communist government, Cruz's father, a shoe salesman, was incarcerated in 1962 for opposing the increased militarization that resulted from Cuba's ties with the Soviet Union. After his release from prison, the elder Cruz was subsequently caught onboard a ship in an attempt to flee to the United States, where he would prepare for his family's arrival at a later date. Cruz's parents remained steadfast in their opposition to the Castro regime; they bought food on the black market and withheld their son from a highly organized system of physical education classes by having a physician friend declare that Nilo had contracted hepatitis. Consequently, Nilo was forced to perpetuate the lie and could not play outdoors with his friends as he had previously. In 1970, the family took a Freedom Flight to the United States, but his parents later divorced. Cruz earned a master of fine arts degree from Brown University in 1994.

      In 2000, Cruz was appointed playwright-in-residence at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, while receiving a similar appointment at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, which commissioned and produced Anna in the Tropics in 2002. Cruz has received grants from the Theatre Communications Group, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His play Night Train to Bolina won the W. Alton Jones Award; Two Sisters and a Piano received the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award. Cruz won the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award for Anna in the Tropics just two days before winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Upon learning that he had

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