Supper and smoke Cuba hovers over Anna and The Cook BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Anna in the Tropics By Nilo Cruz. Directed by Daniel Jáquez. Set by Susan Zeeman Rogers. Lighting by Linda O’Brien. Costumes by Amanda Mujica. Sound by J Hagenbuckle. With Diego Arciniegas, Melinda Lopez, Dick Santos, Robert Saoud, Angela Sperazza, Bobbie Steinbach, and Liam Torres. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through March 26. The Cook By Eduardo Machado. Directed by Michael John Garcés. Set by Adam Stockhausen. Costumes by Elizabeth Hope Clancy. Lighting by Ben Stanton. Sound by David Lawson. Music by José Conde. With Zabryna Guevara, Felix Solis, Monica Perez-Brandes, Che Ayende, and Joselin Reyes. At Hartford Stage through March 27.

The Cuban diaspora has cast island breezes, and shadows of the homeland, over a significant body of Cuban-American drama in the decades since Castro’s revolution. Earlier this season, the Huntington Theatre Company premiered Boston writer Melinda Lopez’s Sonia Flew. Now New England offers plays by two writers at the forefront of Cuban-Americans building theater in the abrupt gap between cultures native and adoptive. Nilo Cruz’s lyrical and pent-up Anna in the Tropics won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for drama (only the second play to do so before being seen in New York); it’s being given a potent area premiere by SpeakEasy Stage Company. Meanwhile, Hartford Stage offers the New England premiere of The Cook, a 2003 work by the prolific Eduardo Machado, who is best known for The Floating Island Plays, a poetical tetralogy that follows an extended Cuban family from wealth gathering in the 1920s to its uprooting by the revolution and exile in America.

Even more directly than the plays of Irish writer Conor McPherson, Anna in the Tropics asserts the power of storytelling. Set in 1929 in a cigar factory in the Cuban-Spanish enclave of Ybor City, Florida (once the "Cigar Capital of the World," now part of Tampa), the play chronicles what happens when a new lectore arrives to carry on the Cuban tabaquería tradition of enlightening the workers while easing their boredom by reading to them. This lectore, a handsome and well-spoken man dressed like a younger and more dapper version of Colonel Sanders, is toting Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina into an overheated, clannish workplace where it will prove more intoxicating, and possibly more toxic, than cigar smoke. (Which for its part is treated like the pinot noir in Sideways, the characters throwing back their heads to blow deep-throaty smoke rings while remarking on the tobacco’s wafts of cherry, orchids, and aged rum.)

On Broadway, Emily Mann’s McCarter Theatre production of Anna in the Tropics, albeit set against a large cigar-box design and despite the palpable chemistry between Jimmy Smits and Daphne Rubin-Vega, seemed too literal, even melodramatic, for the allusive, emotionally charged work. And the large stage just made it that much harder to believe that the cigar factory was employing just six workers, all members of a spontaneous extended family. At the more intimate Roberts Studio Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion, Susan Zeeman Rogers provides a realistic brick-and-clapboard set filled with little cigar-rolling desks and a raised platform for the lectore, but the light and the greenery viewed through the windows are made vivid, as is the sound by J Hagenbuckle. The small space underlines the steamy closeness of the workplace and renders its underpopulation less troublesome. And director Daniel Jáquez finds a balance between the drone of rolling and cutting phallic tubes of tobacco and the lush emotion of the play, in which everyone is projecting himself or herself into the wintry hothouse world of Anna Karenina.

The play begins with a ping-ponging of scenes in which cigar-factory owner Santiago and his younger, half-American brother, Cheché, bet on cockfights as across the stage Santiago’s wife, Ofelia, and their daughters, the married Conchita and the enthusiastic Marela, eagerly await the arrival of the lectore from "the Island" by ship. Once the sexes are thrown together in the runaway sleigh of Anna K, their relations, fueled by art and imagination, get more complicated. A natural yet smoldering Melinda Lopez is Conchita, who at first identifies with betrayed bureaucrat Karenin since she’s been wounded by husband Palomo’s affair with another woman; soon, however, she proves an ardent Anna to the Vronsky of lectore Juan Julian, and Palomo’s passion is rekindled by a mix of jealousy and voyeurism. Candid and lively young Marela falls in love with all things Russian, as an embittered Cheché, whose wife ran off with a previous lectore, gets het up over her. Meanwhile, the proud Santiago broods in an upstairs apartment until he can repay his debt to Cheché, whose frustrations both sexual and professional (he wants to can the lectore and bring in machines) come at last to a tragic boil.

Give or take a little heavy breathing, the SpeakEasy production is passionate yet poised, with Diego Arciniegas adroitly underplaying the measured and sincere yet increasingly charged Palomo and the young Angela Sperazza bubbling as the childlike Marela. Dick Santos brings a grizzled charm to the now chastened, now take-charge Santiago, and Bobbie Steinbach, though a bit of a bubbe as a Latina, captures the warmth and pragmatism of one-time guava-jelly poster girl Ofelia. Robert Saoud is a Cheché who oversteps his bounds yet remains sadly, disarmingly sympathetic. And if Liam Torres brings more slickness than earth to Juan Julian, his seductiveness tied up in a bookstrap, he heats up his bit of Florida turf with Lopez’s roiling yet outwardly warm and smooth Conchita.

The more prosaically written but still vibrant The Cook is rooted, like Machado’s Havana Is Waiting, in the writer’s affecting first visits to his homeland in the late 1990s, after being flown out of Cuba on an Operation Pedro Pan flight in 1961 at the age of nine. His imagination was set flying by lunch at a paladar (private restaurant) in a Havana mansion gone to seed. The eatery was presided over by a woman who had been cook in the home when it belonged to a wealthy family that fled the revolution, never to return. The blonde former mistress of the house still looked down from a photo.

Machado’s play opens on the actual eve of the revolution: New Year’s Eve 1958. The title character, a zesty, culinarily gifted woman in her 30s, holds sway in a grand, turquoise-shuttered period kitchen amid a swirl of hors d’œuvre on silver trays and rumors of Fidel’s approach, as, off stage, the aristocrats cavort in formal wear, exerting their tyranny by way of an abrading buzzer that goes off whenever the bubbly and the crab pastries run low and another deployment of uniformed staff is required.

The second act, set in 1972 and separated from the first by a montage of broadcasts from the 1960s, illustrates the conflicts that have rent chef Gladys’s family since Castro took over. Her chauffeur husband, Carlos, has become a minor but macho Communist functionary; her happy-go-lucky homosexual cousin, Julio, is dodging the secret police; and Gladys herself tends the beloved manse, now done up in revolutionary posters and banners, as if it were a shrine. Act three moves ahead to 1997 and brings a visit from the grown daughter of the pampered woman who fled in act one bundled into a black-mink coat and carrying a make-up case full of cash. The daughter, for her part, is toting a load of inherited bitterness and a very different perspective on relationships and events from those cherished by the cook.

Machado’s even-handed treatment of the political issues is admirable, though the play’s emotional center is the stubbornly faithful Gladys, whose memory of her employers is as tender as her treatment of tamales. And the first-act metaphor of "playing with time" in an oasis where time will stand still as times change provides a poetic touch. But The Cook is a bit paint-by-numbers in its depiction of what 40 years of Communist totalitarianism, the American blockade of Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and various personal disillusions do to people more resilient than their infrastructure. Adria, the young mistress of the first act, shaking the ice in her glass to command a refill, yet communicating a companionship bordering on affection for her mixed-race cook, exhibits a complex blend of condescension and frightened humanity. But the returning daughter of the third act, a conduit for her displaced mother’s acrimony and prejudice, is too much the ugly Cuban-American.

That said, the production at Hartford Stage is as lively as a dance, its culinary choreography set to salsa-tinged music by José Conde and kept masterfully in motion by director Michael John Garcés, who also helmed the play’s debut at New York’s INTAR Theatre (a company devoted to developing and producing work by Hispanic playwrights, of which Machado is artistic director). The set by Adam Stockhausen (who also designed Sonia Flew) is vast, vintage, and colorful, even as time wreaks its ravages. And apart from the overacting of Che Ayende in the overwrought role of the scared gay cousin, the cast is excellent, with Felix Solis capturing the frisky charm as well as the matter-of-fact machismo of Carlos and Joselin Reyes a hot yet wise ticket as his daughter. Monica Perez-Brandes wraps herself in arrogance and fleeting sincerity as the fleeing Adria, then tries to balance confusion with ingrained baggage as the American daughter on a photo safari of her snatched inheritance. Best is Zabryna Guevara, a wiry, fast-chopping young woman whose pragmatic yet valorous Gladys ages 40 years as she presides over Machado’s proof that, when it comes to politics and memory, one woman’s meat can be another one’s poison.