‘Ana en el Tropico’ (‘Anna in the Tropics’): Found in translation at GALA

Playwright Nilo Cruz first found his voice in translation as a boy in Miami when his Cuban immigrant parents would have him decipher missives in English.

Cruz, who was 9 when the family arrived in the United States in 1970, made it his mission to master English as quickly as possible. He knew it was the ticket to success.

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(Oscar Landi) - Playwright Nilo Cruz.

The effort paid off. He studied theater, was admitted into the master’s program in playwriting at Brown University and started writing plays about the Latino experience — always in English. In 2003, his drama “Anna in the Tropics” won the Pulitzer Prize.

He honed his craft so diligently in English that now, like Samuel Beckett, who drafted masterpieces in French, or Joseph Conrad, the greatest English novelist ever raised speaking Polish in the Russian Empire, Cruz prefers to compose in his second language, even though he is a fluent Spanish speaker.

“It was a conscious choice at one point, and then life took me in that direction,” Cruz, 51, says by telephone from Miami in his slightly Spanish-accented English. “I realized early on that if I only did theater in Spanish in this country, I would be limited to a few theaters. . . . I learned to intellectualize the [playwriting] process in English rather than Spanish.”

Now, in a twist, Cruz has translated “Anna” into his native language. “Ana en el Tropico” opens Thursday at GALA Hispanic Theatre. Cruz’s original English will be relegated to surtitles.

For the actors, director and the playwright himself, the Spanish version is teaching unexpected lessons about the nature of language, identity and theater.

“When I saw the play, I saw it in English and I was originally not crazy about it,” says Hugo Medrano, producing artistic director of GALA, who plays the role of Santiago, the family patriarch in “Ana.” “Then I happened to get the Spanish version, and I read the play and it was beautiful. It was like another play for me.”

‘Just breathtaking to hear it’

At the heart of this work in translation is a translation.

Cruz set his drama about love and betrayal, modernity and tradition, in a factory where the Cuban immigrant workers make cigars in the Ybor City section of Tampa in 1929.

In those days, cigar factories employed lectors to read aloud to the workers as they stuffed and rolled cigars by hand. It was a means of transmitting high culture to poorly educated workers, but most of all, it passed the time.

The play opens with a new lector arriving from Cuba. The novel he has selected to read to the workers is Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” The story of tragic Russian love resonates unpredictably in the lives of the play’s characters.

Instead of the English translations of the Russian that Cruz inserted into the original “Anna,” here Spanish seems especially suited to sighing passages of Russian melodrama.

Of course, as any Cuban knows, Spanish comes in many varieties.

A Spaniard named Nacho Artime took the first cut at translating the play from English during the initial success of “Anna,” when Cruz says he was too busy to translate himself.