‘Anna’ offers steamy drama with solid arts foundation

“Literature enlightens listeners and unleashes illicit passions, with liberating and fatal results, in Nilo Cruz’s “Anna in the Tropics.” Though the action of the play centers on the work and sex lives of cigar rollers in a Florida Cuban American tabaqueria in 1929 — when new machines were threatening the traditional hand-rollers’ way of life — the underlying theme of the steamy drama is the impact, indeed the necessity of art.

“Anna” was an unlikely Pulitzer winner in 2003 — less because that made the Cuban-born Cruz the first Latino to receive the drama prize than because it was only the second play to win the award without having been staged in New York. None of the Pulitzer judges had been able to see the script performed. That, in turn, may explain the subtle but haunting disconnect in the TheatreWorks local premiere, which opened Saturday at Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Theatre”

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