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ANNA IN THE TROPICS: Theater Review

From Russia, With Lust: Tolstoy Meets “Florida Man”

By Ed Rampell

It’s ironic that A Noise Within’s absorbing production of Anna in the Tropics opens, as fate would have it, while Russia is making frontpage news. This is because the titular “Anna” is a reference to the eponymous Anna Karenina in Count Leo Tolstoy’s famed 1878 Russian novel. But in this Pulitzer Prize winning play, playwright Nilo Cruz has transmogrified Tolstoy’s saga of infidelity, moving it from Moscow and St. Petersburg (in Russia – not Florida!) to – of all places! – Tampa in the Sunshine State in 1929.

There, Cuban transplants (like the Mantanzas-born Cruz, whose family emigrated to Miami’s Little Havana in 1970) have established an old school-style cigar factory. To break the sheer monotony of long days, often in stifling heat, spent rolling the handmade cigars, “lectors” were hired to read books aloud to the hardworking proletarians. As Tropics opens, a new lector, Juan Julian (Jason Manuel Olazábal) arrives at Tampa and the first novel he has chosen to regale the cigar rollers with is none other than Anna Karenina.

“We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.” This sentence was part of a letter signed by 500 Google employees last October, in which they decried their company’s direct support for the Israeli government and military. 

Ever since Joe Biden ended his speech in Poland on Saturday night by making one of the most dangerous statements ever uttered by a U.S. president in the nuclear age, efforts to clean up after him have been profuse. Administration officials scurried to assert that Biden didn’t mean what he said. Yet no amount of trying to “walk back” his unhinged comment at the end of his speech in front of Warsaw’s Royal Castle can change the fact that Biden had called for regime change in Russia.

 They were nine words about Russian President Vladimir Putin that shook the world: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

I figured I’d better write this column while doing so is still legal (at least I think it is), but I don’t recommend reading it aloud in a third-grade classroom.

There’s a piece of legislation sitting in the

figured I’d better write this column while doing so is still legal (at least I think it is), but I don’t recommend reading it aloud in a third-grade classroom.

Russia’s war in Ukraine -- like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right. International law is what you extol when you aren’t violating it. And at home, rev up the nationalism to go with the militarism.

 While the world desperately needs adherence to a single standard of nonaggression and human rights, some convoluted rationales are always available in a quest to justify the unjustifiable. Ideologies get more twisted than pretzels when some people can’t resist the temptation to choose up sides between rival forces of terrible violence.

 In the United States, with elected officials and mass media intensely condemning Russia’s killing spree, the hypocrisy can stick in the craw of people mindful that the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions started massive protracted carnage. But U.S. hypocrisy in no way excuses the murderous rampage of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

I’ve just become aware of and read the 2020 book by Ned Dobos, Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military. It makes a pretty strong case for the abolition of militaries, even while concluding that it may or may not have done so, that the matter should be taken on a case-by-case basis.

Dobos sets aside the question of whether any war can be justified, arguing instead that “there may be cases where the costs and risks generated by a military establishment are too great for its existence to be justified, and this is even if we think that some wars are necessary and consistent with the demands of morality.”

How the tables have turned. A high-level US delegation visited Venezuela on March 5, hoping to repair economic ties with Caracas. Venezuela, one of the world’s poorest countries partly due to US-Western sanctions is, for once, in the driving seat, capable of alleviating an impending US energy crisis if dialogue with Washington continues to move forward. 

Minute by minute, Putin’s “Peaceful Atom” pushes us to the brink of an atomic Apocalypse…maybe as you read this….likely within hours or days.

Some 440 atomic power reactors now heat this planet, 93 in the US. For a half-century opponents have warned that a madman like Putin could make them spew out enough radiation to burn our species off this planet. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/science/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant.html )

We are headed precisely in that direction. The clock ticks down in real time.

Start at Chernobyl. Despite decades of industry denials that any commercial reactor could explode—-Soviet or otherwise—-Unit Four blew up on April 26, 1986. (For a gut sense of what happened, watch HBO’s five-part mini-series “Chernobyl.”)

The last of Chernobyl’s other three reactors ran through 2000. Unit Four’s blown core is still so hot the world community spent some $2 billion to cover it with a giant shield, aptly called a sarcophagus.

A new global geopolitical game is in formation, and the Middle East, as is often the case, will be directly impacted by it in terms of possible new alliances and resulting power paradigms. While it is too early to fully appreciate the impact of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war on the region, it is obvious that some countries are placed in relatively comfortable positions in terms of leveraging their strong economies, strategic location and political influence. Others, especially non-state actors, like the Palestinians, are in an unenviable position. 

Peace, in the deepest sense — in the midst of war — requires a clarity and courage well beyond the boundaries of linear understanding. The warning lights flash. World War III has entered the red zone.

Can we stare into hell and refuse to see . . . an enemy?

This is the deep, haunting need that is now required, as we clutch tomorrow, hold it tight, vow to protect it with our lives. But it’s far too easy, instead, to surrender to a certainty that the other guy — Russia, with the smirking face of Vladimir Putin — is 100 percent wrong, acting solely out of greed and delusional grandeur, which is something we would never do (and have never done). And it goes without saying we are blameless in all this. On with the show!