Theater review: Anna in the Tropics, at the MET

I can think of no better venue for Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz’s sweltering drama about the tension between tradition and invention, than the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre’s intimate new space in the historic Warwick Theatre. 

The MET’s move to 3927 Main has been a long time coming. Although its previous space (just up the street) was flexible, the theater felt perpetually unfinished, with poor acoustics and a cold, cathedral-like lobby. 

At MET’s new home, the lobby already feels lived-in, warmed with new lighting fixtures and eccentric displays (highlights: a baseball-capped David and an enormous replica of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles). It’s also a much friendlier place to people-watch and sip an intermission drink, if you’re so inclined.

The stage itself is small, and a parade of stout columns on either side made it hard for me to imagine different seating arrangements — but the theater’s artistic director, Karen Paisley, hinted in her pre-show talk at renovations to come that will make the space more flexible.

In the meantime, the company has turned the space constraints to its advantage. Anna in the Tropics has one of most coherent production designs — courtesy of Paisley — I’ve seen at MET to date. Metal scaffolding, dripping with suspended tobacco leaves, forms the bones of the cigar factory while serving as a drying rack for wheat-hued tobacco leaves. Suspended shutters evoke the coastal Southern setting, and a cyclorama flushed with vibrant yellow light makes the factory seem to glow with summer heat. The costume palette is restrained — neutral colors and light linens for a humid summer — and the set dressing feels period-appropriate.

This is 1929, after all, just a few years before automation ripped through the cigar industry like a typhoon. Cruz’s play grapples directly with that transformation. Cuban-American immigrants Santiago (José Faus) and Ofelia (Bonnie Griffin) run their cigar factor in Tampa in the old ways: hand-rolling each cigar while a paid lector, Juan Julian (Matthew Williamson) entertains the workers by reading classic novels out loud. Sure, money’s tight — a product of both declining cigar sales and Santiago’s gambling addiction — but no one’s eager to change the equation.

No one, that is, except Cheché (Andy Penn), Santiago’s half-brother. He begs for them to join the modern world and let him bring in a stuffing machine. And he rails repeatedly against the wasted expense of a lector. Once the machines roll in, he warns, no one will be able to hear the lector read anyway.

This last point turns out to be his main motive. Cheché’s wife ran off with the factory’s previous lector, and Cheché blames the books. As the new lector, Juan Julian, works through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, we begin to see why. The workers quickly become obsessed with romance and consumed by daydreams. Conchita (Victoria Botero) grows weary of her husband’s indiscretions and begins an open affair with Juan Julian. Marela (Athena Horton), Ofelia and Santiago’s youngest daughter, abandons her paste jar and begins sealing the cigars with her tongue.

Cruz’s play won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and it’s perhaps worth noting that the committee awarded that prize by reading the script rather than viewing a live production. Cruz’s language is thick and richly evocative, the linguistic equivalent of a stifling August breeze. But nearly every character has the same stirring command of metaphor and simile — and at times, that musicality can threaten to flatten their voices instead of deepen them. 

“I have the heart of a seal,” Ofelia gasps in one scene, “and when I get excited, it wants to swim out of my chest.” “How does one read the story of your hair?” Juan Julian purrs in another. 

For the most part, MET’s cast members find a way to fold the more magniloquent lines into their own speech patterns. Botero anchors the cast as Conchita, seeming to bloom on stage in front of us. Conchita is a tricky role. In the wrong hands, she can come off as a toony temptress. Instead, Botero shows us a woman’s growing confidence in herself. Her experience with the lector (and Anna Karenina) doesn’t mold her into a different person so much as it unlocks rooms inside of her that were already there. 

Greg Butell exploits the soft side of Palomo, her husband, tempering jealousy with curiosity. Horton plays Marela with an infectious, doe-eyed innocence (though her accent fades in and out like a mistuned radio). And Williamson is well cast as Juan Julian, lending a corny but fun whiff of telenovela romance to the role. 

Faus is a gentle presence as Santiago, and Griffin finds balance with a high-energy performance as his wife. Griffin is a talented actress, and her dialect is consistent — but it’s hard to buy her as a matriarch in her fifties, and her relationship with Santiago feels a bit too chaste as a result. And Penn makes a boisterous Cheché, but he comes off a bit too one-note, all fury and brood. 

Cheché may be the show’s villain, but he’s also a true believer in progress. Cruz positions the cigar factory as a prescient battleground between automation and emotion. The lector becomes a stand-in for the languid romantic past; Cheché becomes the manifestation of modernity, brash, and brutish. 

Anna in the Tropics is a wistful reminder of what we stand to lose in our ruthless pursuit of progress and productivity. MET presents it faithfully and packages it handsomely — but as I left the beautiful new theater, I found myself feeling optimistic about the future nonetheless. 

Anna in the Tropics. Through April 22 at the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre (3927 Main); metkc.org