Pulitzer Winner Anna in the Tropics to Close on February 22

The Broadway run of Nilo Cruz’s Putlizer Prize-winning play Anna in the Tropics will end on Sunday, February 22, according to the show’s publicist. The production opened at the Royale Theatre on November 16, and, at the time of its closing, will have played 15 previews and 113 regular performances.

Jimmy Smits, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Priscilla Lopez, Victor Argo, Vanessa Aspillaga, John Ortiz, and David Zayas star in the play, which concerns workers in a 1929 Cuban cigar factory and the effects that Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina has on their lives. Emily Mann directed the production, which originated at New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre Center.

In his review of the production for TheaterMania, David Finkle wrote, “If the [Pulitzer] judges had experienced Anna in the Tropics in performance rather than on the page alone, they might have recognized that this is a play of modest virtues. It’s an only intermittently successful attempt on Cruz’s part to wave appreciatively at Anton Chekhov and Tennessee Williams.” Finkle added that, “As Rudyard Kipling wrote, ‘A woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke.’ To paraphrase, a good cigar may be a smoke but, sometimes, a play is only a play and not a prize winner.”