Troublemaker, that Tolstoy.
He brings War and Peace to the world, and heartache and happiness to a cigar factory.
War and peace? Heartache and happiness? Betcha the dude couldn't choose between tuna salad and grilled cheese for lunch.
The theater season goes curtain-up at Community College of Southern Nevada with Anna in the Tropics, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize-grabber that plants Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as the maypole around which spins drama and trauma on the cusp of the Depression. But the much-praised play by Nilo Cruz—a Cuban-born American and the first Latino playwright to snare the coveted double P—falters in an awkward, self-conscious staging.
It's an earnest effort with noteworthy performances and interesting, if not entirely successful narrative conceits by Test Market director Ernest Hemmings, working outside his milieu of Downtown's funkier, now-former Social Experimentation and Absurd Theater. Still, Tropics is respectful to the point of reverential, tiptoeing around its material rather than inhabiting it.
Though yea and nay cases can be argued for another Hemmings trimming, color-blind casting in a strongly ethnic piece—a veritable rainbow-coalition cast—here it drains significant flavoring out of Cruz's family stew of a story about a Cubano clan.
Set in 1929 Tampa, in the Ybor City Spanish section, Tropics focuses on cigar factory workers as a new lector—a storyteller hired to read to workers, alleviating the rote ritual of rolling cigars—arrives. While his presence cheers them, he also carries the whiff of sadness, of cherished rites fast receding: Lectors won't be heard over the metallic hum of machines soon to mass-produce products once delicately rolled between human fingers. Rich traditionalism is fading into soulless efficiency.
From that cultural premise, Cruz weaves the personal tale of Juan (James Perham), the lector who comes to read Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's sprawling novel of romance, deceit and adultery in 19th-century Russia, spellbinding his listeners who invest their own agendas—and marital miseries—in the classic story. With its lyrical language, Tropics is as much about the transformative power of art and destructive potential of love as it is the inexorable march from comforting present to uncertain future. Yet this interpretation is less than the sum of Cruz's creation.
On a thrust stage (projecting into the audience, who surround it on three sides), Tropics begins as sisters Conchita (Young Jeon) and Marela (Daisy Justine), and their mother, factory owner's wife Ofelia (Sagirah Mohammed), gently dance near their rolling tables, eventually swaying and free-floating around stage. It's an atmospheric but disorienting opening, as if portending that we won't feel securely tethered to the narrative to come.
Soon, the production's fatal weakness, Perham's lector, arrives. Juan is conceived as a near-saintly shining light dressed all in white, but Perham's charisma—and he's an actor who's got some—is muted and misdirected, more Elmer Gantry-slick than elevated spirit (even on a two-tiered stage that physically lifts him over the workers to whom he recites). The performance is the wobbly center around which this show nearly collapses.
Conchita, stung by her husband's philandering and determined to act in kind, and the sensitive Marela compete for his affections, but the eventual Juan-Conchita bed-down feels emotionless, little more than actors following horizontal stage directions. Consequently, its intended parallel to the novel's affair between passionate Anna and dashing Count Vronsky, the piece's connective tissue, never materializes.
Tabling questions of multi-ethnic casting (which may or may not be a function of limited, available Latino talent), Bob Blomgren plays factory owner Santiago with world-weary humor, and Mohammed invests Ofelia with motherly affection but a no-nonsense streak toward her husband, though she obviously loves him.
Brandon McClenahan as Conchita's mercurial husband, Palomo, is at once moody, intimidating and despairing as he discovers his wife's betrayal, trying to find his way back to her, while Jeon and Justine as sisters both show promising hints of appealing stage presence. But Miakoda Fitzner's glowering factory boss, Cheche, is too opaque to register beyond his violent acts, one that periods the play with tragedy.
Yale Yeandel's evocative set with small tables and a brick-style wall bookending windows that flash from midnight-blue to Day-Glo orange works well, as do the sounds of crickets. But much of the lighting—actors often on a half-illuminated stage, wandering into and out of the light, once playing an entire scene in darkness—is gimmicky bordering on annoying, and several scene changes are clumsy.
A Russian literary giant and an acclaimed Cuban playwright combine for serious writerly firepower in Anna in the Tropics, but this production doesn't quite know where to aim it.