Director's Notes

Dramaturgical Notes

Director's Notes

Many years ago, I fell in love. Eager to begin my life in the theatre, I moved to Manhattan in the late 1970s and met a handsome young man from Colombia who discovered that I knew nothing about the literature of Latin America. Appalled, he undertook my tutelage in this subject with the zeal of a missionary. So began my love affair with the writings of Gabriel García Márquez. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE was the first book pressed into my hands. I was an instant addict and I consumed the great writer's canon with equal zeal. We talked about the legendary and strange town of Macondo (where so many Márquez tales are set) as though we had spent time there ourselves. We gossiped about the characters who inhabited that world as though they were people we knew; and when we met real people, in the no less bizarre land of New York City, they were inevitably compared to their counterparts in Macondo.

A few years later, through my association with an artist from the other side of the ocean, a Greek, and my mentor, Nikos Psacharopoulos, I became immersed in the mythic universe of the classic Greek playwrights as well as the lonely and fragile worlds conjured up by Tennessee Williams and Anton Chekhov. And while William Shakespeare has been a leading player in my literary life for many years now, the realm of myth, of magical realism and the poetic visions of Williams and Chekhov have always held equal sway for me.

Hence, it seemed a gift from the cosmos when Nilo Cruz's adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" was brought to my attention. I had come up empty in my quest to find the perfect show for this season's Outdoor Stage and I was beginning to despair. Nothing seemed right. Suddenly, in my hands, was a mythic and mystical tale, set in a place forgotten by time — much like the Greek amphitheatre of our Outdoor Stage — written by one of my literary heroes and adapted by a man who had just penned a play which illuminated the American theatre with the exhilaration with which a great new "voice" bursts forth. That man, Nilo Cruz, hailed from Cuba, and his play ANNA IN THE TROPICS is breathtaking. He seems to have inhaled the very air blown by the same muses that inspired Williams and Chekhov.

Nilo's adaptation of A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS represents a significant departure from the original Márquez story and therefore stands as a separate work of art for an entirely different medium. Like Shakespeare, it is meant to be performed, not read. And like all great myths — those of the Greeks, those woven by Shakespeare, those of every culture on earth — it is rich, deep and complex. Its meanings are multitudinous and ever-evolving. It sends different messages to different people, and yet its appeal is infinite and universal. It touches the deepest parts of our hearts, souls and our consciousness and encourages and helps us to see glimmers of the eternal truths of the human spirit — truths that transcend time, that cross all geographical and cultural boundaries, and that hearken us back to the one constant of humankind — the commonality of our inner life and the complicated rapture of being alive.

How fitting it seems then, when talking about such universality, that this project, for me, stems from a path crossed by readers, writers and artists from Colombia, Greece, Russia, America, England and Cuba. In the end, however, the important thing is that such paths are revealed, most of all, by the archetypal and immortal secret language that is built into all our hearts.

—Bonnie J. Monte

Dramaturgical Notes

When Nilo Cruz's play Anna in the Tropics came across the desks of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize committee, it lacked one important element of its heavyweight competitors. Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? and Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out had both already enjoyed well-received, New York City productions, seemingly edging out the dark horse in the race to literary prestige. The judges had nothing more than dialogue and stage directions from which to conjure Cruz's Depression-era Tampa. Nevertheless, one committee member admitted experiencing Cruz's world more completely than the other two plays she had seen fully mounted on stage. Such wizardry in fiction writing is arguably dominated by one man who Cruz reverently refers to as "Master Márquez."

Like the Cuban-born Nilo Cruz (who arrived in America without shoes or an English vocabulary), Gabriel García Márquez began his literary career in a humble village near the Caribbean Sea. Founded, in part, by Márquez's grandfather as a banana town, Aracataca, Colombia may be the inspiration for Macondo, the invented setting of many of the author's works. He was raised hearing his grandparents' colorful and wondrous stories of ghosts and spirits. Those storytellers of Márquez's childhood were part of a fading generation of latinoamericanos who told such tales, not as campfire romps, but as chronicles of their life experiences. For them, the intertwining of reality and fantasy was more of a quotidian occurrence than a startling curiosity. When translated into works of art and literature, such a life view becomes "Magical Realism."

Although some critics would like to table Magical Realism when discussing Márquez's canon, it proves quite difficult since the Nobel Laureate is often credited (however incorrectly) with the very creation of the genre. Márquez's unmistakable brand of Magical Realism delves far and deep into the psyche until the oddities that occur in Macondo and its sister towns are as normal and unremarkable as arroz y habichuelas (rice and beans). This phenomenon is seen in the original short story of "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" when Márquez describes the people who gather to see the bizarre old man: "a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him." Upon accepting these mortals' ailments as truth, the reader may believe that there are indeed angels in America.

Nilo Cruz's works are often lumped into the category of Magical Realism as well — but that's not entirely correct. The characters in his plays Night Train to Bolina and Two Sisters and a Piano, for example, exist in harsh, cold realities. Their lives do not cross over into the realm of Magical Realism, yet the feeling of Magical Realism hovers. In Anna in the Tropics, Juan Julián, a lector, or reader, comes to a Tampa cigar factory to read aloud to the workers and help them escape the drudgery and monotony of daily life. He explains, "...as a lector I am a distant relative of the Cacique, the Chief Indian, who used to translate the sacred words of the deities. The workers are oidores. The ones who listen quietly, the same way the Taino Indians used to listen." Juan Julián knows that he is a channel for the spirits that have gone before, and the factory workers are an equal part in that sacred equation.

"I prefer to exclude my work from the school of Magical Realism," Cruz writes in the anthology Out of the Fringe, "because I always like to start from a raw, tangible reality and then have the characters of my plays transform their reality into something magical. I believe in the power of creativity and imagination, not in an existing magical reality."

—Kerri Allen