THE SUMMER OF THE DYING CULTURE: “ANNA IN THE TROPICS,” “CABARET,” “THE LEOPARD,” AND A MINI MIDWEST THEATER TOUR

The best production I’ve seen in decades of going to the highly refreshing, nationally notable countryside American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin is running through late September. Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics is one of the most moving of a spate of works I’ve taken in recently about a dying culture facing change from without and within. Anna was one of three plays I saw on a sort of mini Midwest theater tour while on vacation this August, including that classic elegy to the 1930s Weimar Republic, Cabaret, at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now that we seem to be witnessing a similar moment in our own time, in which half the country celebrates and the other half mourns sweeping changes in the power structure that alter the fabric of society as we know it, the theme is newly poignant.

The plays were a resonant follow-up to two of the highlights of my Spring. Berlin at the Court Theatre covered the same period as Cabaret but with a broader brush, making the city of Berlin itself the lead character. Prayer for the French Republic at the Northlight Theatre looks at the opposite end of World War II and its continuing impact on the people of France. Both were nominated for Jeff Awards this month. 

I also discovered a new favorite film, which is one of the great “dying culture” epics of all time. It has been around for decades but I’d never seen it before: Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, which chronicles the impact of the Italian risorgimento on the aristocracy of Sicily in 1860. I also was introduced to Visconti's second great film on Italian unification, Senso, which does the same for the nobles of Venice in 1866. The recurring theme of a fading world in a season of change resounded throughout my summer. 

Anna in the Tropics at APT

Anna in the Tropics tells the story of a cigar factory in 1929 Ybor City, Florida, where Cuban workers rolling cigars are entertained and enlightened by a “lector” who reads books out loud to them. In this case, the lector picks Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The novel turns out to have parallels to the factory workers’ lives, some of them explicit and some of them left unstated. In the former category, we have an affair between the lector and one of the cigar rollers, resulting in a triangle that mirrors the main plot in Tolstoy’s novel. In the latter camp: Both the play and the novel paint portraits of a civilization facing dramatic change. For Anna Karenina, the Russian aristocracy of the 1870s is losing its place as the ruling class to the country farm workers, some of whom were serfs. This class, the “muzhiks,” are in some cases literally buying up the land, as in Chekov’s Cherry Orchard. Tolstoy’s semiautobiographical character Konstantin Levin describes these changes in the following passage from Anna Karenina:

“You’ll say again that I’m a reactionary, or some other dreadful word like that; but all the same it’s vexing and upsetting for me to see on all sides this impoverishment of the nobility, to which I belong and, despite the merging of the classes, am glad to belong. ... Now muzhiks are buying up the land around us. That doesn’t upset me - the squire does nothing, the muzhik works and pushes out the idle man. It ought to be so. And I’m very glad for the muzhik. But it upsets me to see this impoverishment as a result of -- I don’t know what to call it -- innocence."

Similarly, the factory workers in Anna in the Tropics are a dying breed, a last vestige of a culture where the workers’ souls and intellects are treated with love and care. The lectors are disappearing, and the human cigar rollers are being replaced around the industry with machines – as are the Cubans with Americans. The smart premise of Anna in the Tropics is a pure joy to watch, not only for its sharp juxtaposition of the Russian and the Cuban, but for its spotlighting of a fully seen moment of transition in the pre-Depression world with implications for our world today. Workers in the contemporary world struggle to be treated like humans, too, in the face of threats like artificial intelligence. The play is one of my favorite Pulitzer winners in the first quarter of the 21^st Century, applying poetry and politics to lives that rarely get attention. Not surprisingly, Studs Terkel, who was always interested in the treatment of the working class, is one of the few exceptions. He took notice of the lector phenomenon in cigar factories and included it in his radio program, which still airs, years after his death in 2008, on WFMT in Chicago. But Studs was unique, and Cruz is on to something almost no one else wrote about.

I’m not the only one who thinks Anna in the Tropics is a peak production for this underrated company: The critic for Isthmus, a Wisconsin publication that regularly covers APT, wrote, “Without a doubt, this is the best show I’ve seen at APT, and among the top five theatergoing experiences of my life. It’s not to be missed. By the end, this special theater on a hill feels changed.” The theater is special, doing eight well-selected, often rarely produced plays in the woods of Wisconsin, just down a country road from Frank Lloyd Wright’s home, Taliesin. Last August The New York Times also covered American Players Theatre, under the headline “An Unexpected Bright Spot in Theater? Look to Wisconsin.” Having traveled the country seeing theaters everywhere, and having correctly predicted the Regional Tony multiple times, APT is one I’d pick for a short (or anyway medium) list for that award. It would be the first Regional Tony for Wisconsin, which might help speed its selection. It is notable in part for its beautiful setting. The stage upon which Anna was produced is located at the top of a hill, under the stars, and plays in almost all weather from May to October. APT also has a small indoor space, the tickets for which usually sell out early in the summer for the whole season. I saw Yasmina Reza’s Art there the same weekend I saw Anna. It was a highly competent production of a show that is opening for a revival on Broadway this fall.  

After I saw Anna in the Tropics, I looked back at The New York Times review of that show’s Broadway production in 2003, which was mounted shortly after it won the Pulitzer Prize, and it seemed as if APT director Robert Ramirez was responding directly to critic Ben Brantley’s remarks on that production. Ramirez cleaned up several of the problems Brantley reported and proved that the play is better than Brantley thought. Anna’s “confrontations and collisions are rendered in some of the most densely lyrical language since Maxwell Anderson,” Brantley wrote. “No one, It seems, is able to speak without summoning a poetic conceit. Living in Tampa is like being in ‘the mouth of a crocodile.’ Ofelia’s heart is like a swimming seal. A lover asks his beloved, ‘How does one read the story of your hair?’”

Well, anyone can make it sound silly. What APT does is much harder: It makes Cruz’s poetic dialogue sing with an otherworldly quality that feels believable despite its heightened nature. This is partly because, unlike the Broadway production, Ramirez does not limit Anna to naturalism. In between scenes, for example, when the actors change the furniture on the set, they do so almost in ballet, staying in character and even developing the character arc but moving with abstract grace. This reminds us that the play is not aiming to simply render reality as it is, but to present something more beautiful and symbolic. That helps us swallow all the poetry spoken by factory workers whose first language is Spanish. Ramirez’s poetic stage pictures do the same thing as the dialogue is underway.

By contrast, Brantley thought the Broadway production was too literal to pull off Cruz’s poetry. “On the page, such rhetoric scans better than it does on the stage,” he said, adding “It makes sense that the Pulitzer judges awarded the prize to Anna without ever having seen it performed. In a less literal-minded physical production, the ornate tropes might seem less obtrusive. But [director Emily] Mann, who staged Anna earlier this year at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., where she is the artistic director, fails to find the dramatic equivalents to Mr. Cruz’s prose.” The APT production finds dramatic equivalents, including in the set change choreography.

The set for the Broadway production, meanwhile, was apparently minimalist, while the APT set (designed by Courtney O’Neill) had scale and scope, and many moving pieces to afford the “ballet” more action. Brantley wrote of the New York production: “The performers often look small and adrift against Robert Brill’s stark wooden set… The characters are most often arranged into horizontal lines. The contrast is presumably deliberate, to emphasize the gap between tender fantasy and harsh reality. But such naturalism also exposes the unnaturalness in Mr. Cruz’s writing, and you become overly aware of how everyone speaks in the same artificial language, even when it doesn’t suit the individual character.” O’Neill’s set at APT doesn’t have that problem, and the play comes off better for it.

Anna’s conclusion does feel somewhat rushed in the APT production. Cruz may be to blame, but I think it’s partly the fault of an unusual casting choice so likeable it fails to prepare us for the end. Sam Luis Massaro as Cheche, a part-owner of the factory who wishes to lose the lector and buy rolling machines, is not the usual type for the role. He plays it more as a nerdy intellectual than as the “heavy” he is usually—an interesting choice but his amiability gets in the way when the character transforms into a monster. I won’t reveal what happens as the play closes, but there were gasps. The cast is otherwise one of the strongest I’ve seen on the hill. Standouts include Triney Sandoval, who also stars in Art, bringing multiple notes of strength, desperation, and comic futility to the character of the factory’s owner, Santiago. I’ve seen Sandoval more than once on Broadway, and it’s nice to see him in two meaty lead roles here in the woods. APT regular Elizabeth Ledo brings sensitivity and humor to Santiago’s wife, Ofelia. As Juan Julian, the lector, Ronald Roman-Melendez gives Jimmy Smits (who played the part on Broadway) a run for his money, bringing a similar strength of character and stability.

Cabaret at the Guthrie

The rapidity with which the Guthrie Theatre’s Cabaret slides from the hedonistic libertinism of 1920s Weimar to the Nazi reign of 1930s Germany is dizzying. Our view of this properly sickening transformation is introduced in this production not by the usual androgynous male as the Kit Kat Club’s Emcee, but instead by an androgynous female. Jo Lampert, who I’ve also seen in New York, objectifies the women dancers with no less oily charm than Alan Cuming, who I saw play the part on Broadway. The action is mostly limited in this production to set designer Marion William’s small square platform in the center of the huge stage of the Guthrie’s beautiful, cavernous, 1,100-seat Wurtele Thrust space, one of three stages in the gorgeous building. This lends an intimacy to the action that would otherwise be impossible in this big house, though it does seem strange as the rest of the stage is rarely used. A series of square set pieces hanging from the top of the theater represent variously a train, dressing rooms at the cabaret, and in a shocking twist, a concentration camp. But often they go unused. Director Joseph Haj, who is the artistic director of the Guthrie, uses the space to entertain and then shock us. The production does both ably.

The Leopard and Senso

Film director Luchino Visconti was a former aristocrat in Italy, and, during the years when he directed The Leopard (1963) and Senso (1954), also a member of the Italian Communist Party, so he had a unique sympathy for both sides of the economic spectrum. His nostalgia for Italy before its unification is evident in both movies, in his compassion and passion for the aristocrats, but his sympathy for the poor and working classes also shows up in a brief scene that anchors the whole of The Leopard. Burt Lancaster, whose voice is dubbed with an Italian actor’s in the version I saw but who nonetheless gives a memorably powerful performance, plays an aging Sicilian prince in 1860, as Italian freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi invaded Sicily. The freedom fighters win against all odds, leading to the partial unification of the Italian states. In the scene I mentioned, Lancaster is being accompanied through the poverty-stricken streets of Palermo by a politician modeled on the Count of Cavour, the prime minister of the northern Italian state of Sardinia. Cavour, as he was known, was one of the masterminds of the new constitutional monarchy of the inchoate nation of Italy. This politician tries to convince the prince to join the new Italian senate and participate in a democratic republic that will replace the fragmented system of monarchic states that has left Sicily in dire straits economically. The prince refuses, saying that in 200 years things will be different – but worse. His position is nuanced and tenuous. “For everything to stay the same, everything must change,” he says, acknowledging that the constitutional monarchy must replace the Bourbon dynasty if the nobles are not to be subjected to what they dread most — a republic. Netflix just released a mini-series that remakes The Leopard, but the original film is so good it’s not entirely clear why that was necessary. A historian on the special features of the Criterion Collection Blu-ray says even Italians can get confused by the level of detail in the politics of Visconti’s Leopard, but I found the comprehensive political content refreshing. This was probably partly due to the fact that I’d coincidentally been reading about Italian unification. But even though it places at number 90 on the Sight and Sound 250 best films of all time, it still seems underrated to me. Haunting and sweeping, with amazing natural light photography of gorgeous Sicilian settings, The Leopard is one of the best historical epics ever made. 

The Leopard’s spiritual sequel (though it was made first) is Senso, which picks up the action six years later in 1866, as Garibaldi moves the theater of his war to Venice. The Austrian empire is hanging on to one last province, Venetia, in which Venice is located, and this melodrama focuses on a romance between a soldier for the Austrians and a Venetian countess who describes herself as Italian through and through. She cheers on Garibaldi as he takes over, but the Austrian makes clear to her that unification will change everything she is used to. Operatic and overwrought, it’s not as good a film as The Leopard. But if you happen to like opera, as I do, this film is one for you.

Thus, as things change rapidly in America, my summer was spent watching other societies try to cling to the remainders of the normalcies they knew. Sometimes the changes are desirable, as in the liberalization of Italy during and after the 1860s, or the transition from the inequality of 19th Century Russia. Tolstoy and Visconti could afford their ambivalence. But the stories of lives left behind after the changes are full of poignancy and drama.