Tropical Tolstoy, 9/11 Piece Win in Drama, Music

Nilo Cruz, a New York-based Cuban American playwright whose “Anna in the Tropics” explores Tolstoy’s themes in the close quarters of a cigar factory outside Tampa, Fla., won the Pulitzer Prize for drama Monday. The music prize went to John Adams, the Berkeley-based composer who took on the job of responding musically to the horror and aftermath of Sept. 11 and came back with a 25-minute sound collage called “On the Transmigration of Souls.”

For Cruz, the first Latino to win the award, the news arrived by cell phone as he stood on a railroad platform in New Haven, Conn., where he had been teaching a drama class at Yale.

“I feel like all Latinos are winning,” the 42-year-old writer said, jubilation and amazement competing in his voice. “This is definitely going to make room for other playwrights writing about the Latino experience in the United States. This boy from a poor family in Cuba.... I feel like Miami is winning it, Cuba and Puerto Rico are winning it, all Mexican writers are winning it. I’m in a train station, and I’m on my way to heaven -- the heaven you get while you’re alive.”

“Anna in the Tropics,” set in 1929, takes place among Cuban workers in a Tampa cigar factory, where a “lector” reads to them from Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” while they labor. As the story advances, themes and scenarios from the novel begin to play themselves out in the workers’ lives.

The drama was commissioned by the New Theatre, a 104-seat house in Coral Gables, Fla., which staged the play’s world premiere in October. Cruz said he had an inkling that he might have a chance at the Pulitzer when “Anna in the Tropics” won the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award last weekend, a $15,000 prize given to the best new play originating outside New York.

South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa has set a public reading of “Anna” for May 16 as part of the company’s annual Pacific Playwrights Festival. A full production of “Anna,” its West Coast premiere, is due to follow at South Coast Rep in October.

Cruz’s most successful previous play, “Two Sisters and a Piano,” examined Cuban dissidents who protest against the Castro regime. A new work, “Lorca in a Green Dress,” will have its premiere this summer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

In Adams’ case, the prize recognizes one of the most daunting commissions faced by an American composer in decades. In January 2002, about four months after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, the New York Philharmonic invited Adams to write a piece reflecting on the disaster. In March, he visited the site with several police officers who had been there on the day of the attacks.

On Sept. 19, shortly after the anniversary of the disaster, the orchestra gave Adams’ 25-minute work its premiere, a performance that was also broadcast live via radio. In addition to the orchestra, “On the Transmigration of Souls,” which aims to evoke a vast holy space, incorporates taped street sounds, voices reading victims’ names, a chorus of adults and a chorus of children.

“I’m humbled and honored if [the prize] brings honor to the New York Philharmonic and family members [of victims] whose thoughts I used,” Adams said Monday, adding that his ambition was “to use my musical language to write something of depth that reflects the world around me.... Trying to describe this shows why we composers write music and not words.”

In a review of the premiere of “Transmigration of Souls,” The Times’ music critic Mark Swed called it “something of wonder, mystery and beauty to contemplate.” After Monday’s announcement, he added that “John Adams, more than any other classical composer working today, has come to represent American music, not unlike the way Aaron Copland did for an earlier generation.”

In his review of “Transmigration of Souls,” New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini called Adams’ composition a meditative work that is rhythmically static and largely without melody. “The richness and solemnity of this music,” he continued, “come primarily from its harmony, a subtle mix of sturdy tonality and anxious, stacked-up orchestra chords spiked with shards of dissonance.”

Adams is 56. He was born in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard, moved to Northern California in the early 1970s and served as the San Francisco Symphony’s composer-in-residence from 1979 to 1985. He drew wide attention with two operas, “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which is based on the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists. Both of those politically tinged projects were developed in collaboration with Los Angeles-based stage director Peter Sellars.

The oratorio “El Nino,” another operatic collaboration with Sellars, premiered in Paris in late 2001 and was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic March 13-16 in Los Angeles and March 20 and 22 in New York. Adams’ “Century Rolls,” a piano concerto written for Emanuel Ax, was a Pulitzer finalist in 1998.

“Transmigration of Souls” has not been performed outside New York, nor is a commercial recording available.