Formal and intertextual analysis of the play Anna in the Tropics, by Nilo Cruz

• Grant number: 17/16761-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: December 01, 2017
• End date: November 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Theatre
• Principal Investigator: Maria Sílvia Betti
• Grantee: João Victor Pereira da Silva
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This Undergraduate Research project aims at analyzing the epic and intertextual expediences in the play "Anna in the Tropics", by Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz, which refers to the novel "Anna Karenina", by Liev Tolstoi. The play - the first by a Latin-American author to be awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, in 2003 - depicts the changes brought to the lives of the workers of a Cuban cigar factory in Florida, in 1929, by the arrival of a new lector, a professional that, in the Cuban tradition, was hired to read to the tabaqueros as they rolled cigars. When the novel the reader selects to read to the workers turns out to be the Russian classic, a sequence of events build, within the play, forms of parallelism or analogy with the novel. This study intends to observe the procedures of intertextuality employed in "Anna in the Tropics", with the objective of assessing the epic nature - typical of the European romanesque narratives, such as "Anna Karenina" - incrusted in the dramatic texture of the play, by investigating the epic engenderment of the two levels of storytelling that this intertextuality establishes in the play: that of the novel being read and the one unfolding in the cigar factory. In this research, references might be made to plays by different authors who have, in the past, portrayed the immigrant worker in the historical context of the United States, such as Eugene O'Neill, Michael Gold, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Luis Valdez, etc. (AU)