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Title: Anna in the Tropics
ISBN: 1559362324
Author:
Nilo Cruz
Publicate Date: 2003-09-01
Publish: 2003-09-01
List Price: $13.95
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $4.00
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $1.11
Amazon Merchant Price: $11.86
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Hot blooded Latins
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina isn't a book that you would usually think of people
getting really passionate about. The cigar factory becomes a place where
people have issues about love and it is centered around a handsome
reader of books. The explosion is a while building and when it happens,
you knew something was on the way...
It is well written play, but I really don't like it very well.
Maybe that is a good thing?
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2: Still unsure how I feel about it.
Nilo Cruz, Anna in the Tropics (Theatre Communications Group, 2002)
I've been trying, on and off, to review this for almost three months now, and I haven't been able to get anything to stick. My original idea was to write something about what a fine period piece it is, but it kept ringing hollow, since I'm not old enough to have been around during the period in question. It feels right, but if I've learned anything in forty years, it's not to trust my sense of nostalgia for things that occurred before I was born. (And the more my daughter's generation embraces the seventies, the more I have that reinforced in my head.) Then came ideas for a long missive about the parallel between the plot here and Anna Karenina, the novel read by the lector in this play, but that seemed far too obvious to spend a great deal of time on; it is, after all, the mechanism that moves the play. I eventually came to the realization that this is so far outside my normal sphere of experience that I don't really have much of anything to say about it except what I felt. I enjoyed reading it, though I do think it got heavy-handed at times. Cruz id very good at letting the surface story mask what's really going on; most of the actual action of this play goes on just to the left of the stage, as it were, and we're left to interpret things ourselves. I find this to be a very good thing. It is overshadowed at times by that heavy-handedness, which is just as much a paradox as it sounds, so I ended up with conflicting feelings. But the fact that I'm still thinking about it three months and almost one hundred fifty books later certainly says something about its power to stay with the reader long after the cover is closed. ***
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3: At last, some content
Given that most plays should be seen and not read, this play is, for contemporary drama, refreshingly ambitious. It takes on the question of the transformative nature of art in life. Art gives dignity: These people, after all, roll cigars. But in a world of dignified work, they dress to come to work, take pride in their craft, and spend their days listening to performances (like those attending the play, right?), analyzing characters and plot and performers. To be displaced by a machine is not only to lose the craft of their work--the hand-rolled fine cigar displaced by the MacStoagie--but to lose, in the din of tending the machine, the opportunity to listen to performance. Is the bottom line more important than art? The symbolism may be heavy-handed, but the dramatist, after all, must work quickly to make his point. Shakespeare it ain't, but I found it refreshing to read a play with aspirations to lofty content.
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4: Loved it on stage!
I saw a university perform it and it blew me away! I saw the reviews and pictures for the broadway production and I feel that the more professional version is not doing the play justice as UTEP did. I still think that it is a beautiful well, written play.
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5: Overrated Nonsense
Living near McCarter Theater in Princeton my AP English class got to go see a production of this play while it was still being work-shopped for Broadway.
Afterwards, my teacher asked what we all thought, of course first stating that she loved it so that all of the "favorite" students knew which opinion to take.
They all raised their hands and said they loved it to, however, no one could say why. Why not? Because everyone hated it.
I was the first to open the flood gate.
"I thought it was ridiculous. It has no real substance to the plot."
"That's because the language is the point"
"Well the language is the worst part. Why would poor factory workers speak in absurdly flowery metaphors? Especially ones that stupid ('Does the bicicle miss the boy?')?"
My teacher flipped out at this.
"You don't understand! That's what literature is all about! Metaphors!"
The woman, asides from being a gigantic b**ch, was merely blinded by what reviews had told her to think and by her crush on Jimmy Smitts.
A month later, the New York Times, reviewed the play after its Broadway premiere. They said pretty much exactly what I thought. I was going to bring the review into class, but why bother? The woman already hated me.
PS. One earlier reviewer discussed how it was impossible to determine from the production the the daughter was raped. During a Q&A afterwards, Emily Mann stated that they were having problems deciding how to show this. I agree with the reviewer that they clearly didn't come to a good solution.
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