Passion play Brown’s steamy Anna In the Tropics BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Anna In the Tropics By Nilo Cruz. Directed by Lowry Marshall. With Thomas Lipinski, Angelica Scherer, Lucy DeVito, Michael Obremski, Daniel Hernandez, Aaron Cutler, Reese Smith, and Joshua Unseth. At Brown University Theater and Sock & Buskin through October 31.

Anna In the Tropics is a love song to romance and trust in one’s heart, a lyrical flight that at the same time keeps its feet squarely on the ground.

It’s appropriate that Brown University Theater and Sock & Buskin have staged such a well-performed and precisely cast production, considering that playwright Nilo Cruz got his creative writing MFA at Brown in 1994. Cruz studied in the playwriting program of 1998 Pulitzer winner for drama Paula Vogel, and he went on to win last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Anna.

The play performs a series of little arm-wrestling contests with itself. It’s set in a 1929 Tampa cigar factory, where a threat of change comes from machinery designed to replace the process of rolling cigars by hand. That overarching danger is posed against the necessity of change between several pairs of characters, and the catalyst for such changes is the story of the defiant title heroine in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

The novel is being read aloud to the workers by a newly hired lector, the handsome Juan Julian (Thomas Lipinski). Three years later such readers were no longer employed in the factories, as cigar-making machines operated by low-paid American workers replaced the old system of skilled hand work. (Cruz attached that information to his setting description, making sure that we are aware of the looming threat to this way of life.)

The owner of the factory is Santiago (Daniel Hernandez), an impetuous man who at a cock fight that opens the story loses gambling money, and some say in the running of his business, to his half-brother Cheché (Aaron Cutler). Santiago’s wife, Ofelia (Reese Smith), won’t let him get away with a thing, but is supportive when it counts, as well as feisty.

The carnal temptation that Juan Julian poses to their two daughters gets some comical underscoring at the beginning, when the women greet the boat bringing in the new lector and the younger of the two grown daughters, Marela (Lucy DeVito), pees in excitement. For a short while it remains a matter of suspense whether she or her married sister, Conchita (Angelica Scherer), will become his love interest.

The relationship of Conchita and her husband, Palomo (Michael Obremski), is the most fascinating one here, though. In macho Latino tradition, he has a mistress somewhere, as his wife knows and handles with off-handed confrontation. Their mutual accommodation, forced by circumstances and reciprocal affection, is surprising and intriguing to watch. Obremski may very well have the most difficult acting task here, whipsawed as his character is between jealousy and gradual awareness of just how deeply love can take root.

Not one of the main actors fails to deliver more than they need to, each of them coming up with little touches that convey fully inhabited characters. The women have the opportunities to be the most charming, so from DeVito we get a buoyant younger daughter, from Scherer an insightful Conchita, and from Smith an understanding wife and mother that the family can go to in laughter or tears.

Much has been written about the lyricism of Anna In the Tropics, but as beautiful as the language can be, equally impressive is how naturally Cruz has blended it into everyday conversation. The play is decorated with unnaturally poetical talk that these actors not once make sound arch or artificial. Ofelia says, "I have the heart of a seal, and when I get excited it wants to swim out of my chest." Aspiration is an undercurrent here, so Marela says how "everything in life dreams. A bicycle dreams of becoming a boy . . . a chair dreams of becoming a gazelle and running back to the forest." Cruz’s is a magnificent, illuminating style that owes much to Latin American magical realism — he lifts one image, that of a trickle of blood finding its way to a fitting doorway, straight out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Under the direction of Lowry Marshall, this ensemble set forth on their opportunity under full sail and came back with glistening treasure. Juan Julian says that he chose Tolstoy because he understands humanity like no other writer, and this staging swiftly humanizes frailties at every chance. Perhaps to balance the affirmative romanticism abounding, at one point this production darkens a relationship — Cheché’s lust for Marela — from how it was originally staged and published.

The set design by Michael McGarty makes the cigar factory an airy shell, a ceiling fan slowly circulating the hot air that we feel when Marela rolls a cool drinking glass across her cheek. Lighting design by Tim Hett and costumes by Phillip Contic maintain the mood aptly.

As usual, a Brown troupe have come up with a wonderful realization of a playwright’s promise to us.