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Summary: All plays are meant to be seen, not read.
Review: There is a review here about this play being better to see than to read. This should be true of all plays, since that's their purpose. In fact, if you really enjoy reading a play, in the same exact way you enjoy reading a novel- it very likely may not be a good play & should in fact be a novel instead.Having said that, I believe Anna in the Tropics is a great and beautiful play. Reading it I can see how wonderful it would be to see on the stage; watching these very real characters go through their vulnerable journeys; I enjoyed my copy thoroughly.
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Summary: i want to read it
Review: who can help me to get the script? I'm in China.
thank you so much1
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Summary: "Today we are baptizing our new cigar...Anna Karenina."
Review: Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Anna in the Tropics recreates the Cuban-American community in Ybor City, Florida, in 1929,with its color, its cockfights, its close relationships, and its love of romance. Santiago and his wife Ofelia own a cigar factory, where the sometimes illiterate workers roll cigars and, to keep from becoming bored, hire a "lector" to read to them. Romantic stories spice up their lives, and since they have finished Wuthering Heights, they now look forward to a new novel, Anna Karenina, read by a new lector, Juan Julian.
Conchita, one of the workers whose marriage with Palomo has grown stale, soon finds herself reenacting Anna Karenina, as she has a passionate affair with Juan Julian, and then tells Palomo about it. Marela, daughter of Santiago and Ofelia, also fantasizes about Juan Julian. Reality intrudes on romance, however, when Santiago's gambling on cockfights results in partial ownership of the factory going to Cheche, his half-brother, who now wants to introduce machines to speed up production. He also wants to eliminate the lector, to the workers' further dismay.
In language that is often lyrical and sometimes fanciful, the action unfolds, with discussions evolving about the nature and importance of literature, the enduring values of their culture, the importance of love, and the possible effects of "progress" on traditional values. The characters, though not fully drawn and sometimes too obviously following plot lines of Anna Karenina, are, nevertheless, interesting and unusual as they try to do the best they can during trying times. To celebrate their happiness with the story of Anna Karenina, they decide to create a new cigar in her honor, and to have Marela serve as the model for the cigar box, but their happiness is as fragile and temporary as the idea of a "family" of workers making cigars without machines.
When disaster strikes, it affects the entire factory, and the characters must decide to what extent it is possible to remain in a fantasy world when reality has reared its ugly head, and to what extent it is possible to hold on to the past when the survival of the factory may depend on progress. The obvious themes, their rather thin development, and the plot lines which parallel Anna Karenina show playwright Nilo Cruz's desire to give significance to this tragedy, though the characters do not develop fully on their own. Unique and unusual in its approach, however, the play beautifully captures a time and place in history. Mary Whipple
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