Thursday, Oct. 15 to Sunday, Oct. 18 in Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall’s Studio Theatre, the College of William and Mary’s theatre and performance department put on the play “Anna in the Tropics” in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. The show featured slow, syncopated rhythm and brass in its opening score that transported audiences back to the world of one 1920s Cuban immigrant family’s life in Tampa, Florida and their cigar rolling factory.
Cynthia Santos DeCure, a former associate professor at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama and an expert in Latine theatre and dialect work, served as guest director for the play. DeCure said she always begins the creative process with a playlist to step into the imaginative world.
DeCure used extensive character, physicality and dialect work to create the world of “Anna in the Tropics.” She said she would always start rehearsals with a warm up to help students embody their characters. Preparation included table work where actors did text analysis, searching for subtleties compared to what’s literal on the page.
Amanda Sobrado ’27, a theatre and performance major who played the eldest daughter Conchita, highlighted how important it was that her body language be accurate to the time period.
“Physicality is how you carry yourself when you are in character. My posture has to be completely up the whole time,” she said. “There are certain ways where I can conduct my hand movements or ways that I can talk and walk that would be in period and not in period. It’s a completely separate physical language.”
Not only was physicality important, but dialect and linguistic identities were a key element of stepping into the characters. DeCure’s approach was to work with each actor’s linguistic identity and develop their dialects to be most natural for them.
“It allows each actor to not just put on some sound shifts, but find a nuance and rhythm. And once you find that grounding architectural rhythm of your character, it’s like you find that character’s soul,” she said.
This rhythm starts with understanding the difference between Spanish and English, as well as the Cuban English dialect.
“Spanish is a syllable time, where all of the syllables have something closer to equal weight. On the other hand, English is a stress time. You usually have a single stressed syllable, or a phonological peak of a sound in each word. The Cuban English dialect has a richness in pitch, and sentences end in the pitch going up,” DeCure said.
The play’s central family hand rolls their cigars, a tradition and practice that is characterized by a romantic, slower-paced work ethic. Cigars have a spiritual significance in Cuban culture, and hand rolling them is a craft brought over from the home country.
DeCure discussed how cigars represent tradition.
“What are those things that are important to us, that we want passed up to our children, that are meaningful to us?” she said. “I think when families have to leave their home country and are living in exile or as migrants or immigrants, you’re trying to bring a little piece of home with you. And why do we hold on to it? Families need tradition, music, food and reminders of how we grew up.”
As workers roll cigars, the lector, traditionally well-dressed and well-spoken, reads books such as “Anna Karenina” to educate and entertain the workers. While the owner’s half brother, Che Che pushes to modernize the factory, the family opposes modernization because it would replace their roles with machines and there would be no need for a lector.
Kiran Behr ’27, a government major who played Palomo, Conchita’s husband, read about machismo culture from the time and took a class on “Anna in the Tropics” in order to create his macho, jealous and suave character.
Behr emphasized the importance of Palomo’s characterization shifts throughout the play. In the first act, Palomo is having an affair and is fed off of Conchita’s jealousy. Then, in the second act, the roles flip and he is the one ridden with jealousy as he interrogates Conchita. He is not only jealous but curious of what she does with the factory’s new lector, Juan Julián.
“He says, ‘show me.’ And it’s not an act of aggression; he says that, it’s truly curiosity. And that’s when he becomes willing to drop this façade of the macho man,” Behr said. “He is willing to step into the shoes of someone who wants to learn from his partner. He goes from being someone who’s concerned about his image to being concerned about pleasing his partner and to be better.”
Sobrado underscored how Conchita’s sexual liberation leads to more confidence and power for her character.
“She has a lot of scenes that are intimate with other people. Creating that enjoyment and pleasure has been her biggest goal: trying to show her as a strong woman who is doing something she likes for herself,” she said.
Behr also explained how the conflict between two opposing characters symbolizes relevant issues in the present day. Che Che represents mechanization, while Juan Julián represents intellect, art and knowledge.
“Those machines, to me, just represent lack of care,” he said. “It takes away the art from, in this case, cigar rolling, which is a beautiful art form because of the care that is taken by the craftsman. You can make the connection that a lot of culture and the care and beauty has been stripped away by mechanization and AI.”
The play’s last scene showed a behavior change in Palomo again, as he steps up to the lector’s chair to finish reading “Anna Karenina” after Che Che shoots and kills Juan Julián.
“In my mind, Palomo, though he really despises Juan Julián, also idolized him,” Behr said. “He also wants to be sophisticated like him. He absorbed his influence and wanted to step up in a way that Juan Julián did.”
When Palomo goes to read “Anna Karenina,” the play leaves the audience wondering how Palomo and Conchita’s marriage will end up, and what Palomo had been meaning to tell his wife.
DeCure hoped audiences would leave with the central themes of modernization and the power of literature.
“Our most prevalent questions have to do with modernity: what do we hold on to? Do we hold onto old systems because this is what we know, or do we adapt to new technology? And I think we’re grappling with that right now,” DeCure said. “It’s also the power of literature. The spoken word has the power to transform human beings, and when we really allow ourselves to learn from history, to learn from literature, to learn from different languages and dialects from across the globe, then so many things can happen.”
