"There's something about theatre and the immediacy of theatre. You have to suspend your imagination and be generous as an audience'just as the actor needs to be generous and has to surrender to the moment on stage. We all have to inhabit this imaginary world." - Nilo Cruz, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright

A scene in Anna in the Tropics which best illustrates playwright Nilo Cruz's theme of modern conveniences threatening the imaginative spirit sets the Florida tobacco factory's manager against Juan Julian, the lector who reads to the workers as they hand-roll Cuban cigars. It's 1929, and customized smokes are going the way of the pony express. But Juan Julian offers a pungent warning: 'This fast mode of living with machines and moving cars affects cigar consumption. And do you want to know why, Señor Chester? Because people prefer a quick smoke, the kind you get from a cigarette. The truth is that machines, cars are keeping us from taking walks and sitting on park benches, smoking a cigar slowly and calmly. The way they should be smoked. So you see, Chester, you want modernity, and modernity is actually destroying our very own industry. The very act of smoking a cigar.'

Granted, some may argue against Cruz's nostalgic tone, which could be interpreted as a romanticized rant against progress. Others may claim his bemoaning of advanced technology has been sufficiently addressed'going all the way back to the invention of the wheel. But more tactile elements of our lives keep disappearing at an astonishing speed: e-mail has replaced letter writing; the rise of digital cameras is making film obsolete. Our lives keep speeding up, and quality time with loved ones'or with our own thoughts'seems to be diminishing.

Cruz is trying to rekindle these quiet, flesh-and-blood connections through his writing.

'These are the things I'm interested in trying to recreate,' says Cruz, whose Anna in the Tropics (running through Oct. 26 at Victory Gardens Theatre) received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 'Anna is a play about this lost tradition'a culture on the brink of change.'

The Cuban-born playwright, who lives in New York City, was speaking long distance from South Coast Repertory in California, where he was overseeing rehearsals for a new production of Anna. There's another one going up at New Jersey's McCarter Theatre, and the play begins previews on Broadway Nov. 1. Yet, even in the midst of these sweeping post-Pulitzer demands, Cruz takes the time to talk about those profoundly simple moments in life that involve human contact and a certain reveling in contemplation.

The cigar smoke circling around Anna in the Tropics subliminally reminds us to slow down, to strike up a conversation with someone, to indulge in the pleasure of doing nothing.

Anna involves a love triangle sparked by the appearance of lector Juan Julian, who reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to the factory workers. But the love affair, while physical, is also tied to nourishing the body with sensual dreams.

Cruz's work, however, is inherently non-dramatic'written more like a short story in a poetic, otherworldly style than a play. A cigar is slipped into one man's mouth 'like a pearl diver;' words linger in the air 'like a zeppelin.' So the play mirrors the central idea of a lector, with the audience experiencing Anna as if the words are being read to them. The images that float through our minds have the same quality of the meandering cigar smoke so crucial to the play's ethereal (yet earthy) tone.

Anna's intense literary quality may be one of the reasons why the Pulitzer committee selected it without having seen a production (Anna premiered at Miami's New Theatre). Until the Pulitzer, Cruz was relatively unknown, even though he had crafted an impressive body of work. Drawn to poetry and music since childhood, he finds much of his inspiration from reading classic novels, notably the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Federico Garcia Lorca (a newer work, Lorca in a Green Dress, debuted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

'It's interesting,' comments Cruz. 'I read more novels than plays. I think theatre has to be experienced.'

Yet his dramas tend to be novels on stage'a fusion of oral and written storytelling. And theatre is essentially a sacred place where stories are told and traditions passed on.

'I'm interested in exploring how rituals are important in our lives,' says the playwright with delicate intensity. 'There's something about theatre and the immediacy of theatre. You have to suspend your imagination and be generous as an audience'just as the actor needs to be generous and has to surrender to the moment on stage. We all have to inhabit this imaginary world. The play is taking shape before our eyes.'

Cruz chose playwriting over other genres because he believes 'theatre is the closest thing to life.'

And it is his seamless joining of the imagined world with reality that has prompted critics to elevate him to the Latino pantheon of magical realists, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Maria Irene Fornes. But he takes issue with the term, noting that there's no distinction between what may be perceived as supernatural and what is concrete.

'I never really liked the term magical realism,' Cruz confides. 'There's something detached about it. It's almost like looking at the work from the outside rather than going into the landscape. The work can be bigger than magical realism.

'For example, in my play Lorca in a Green Dress, people may think Lorca is a spirit. But, to me, Lorca is real. And I don't see that choice as a metaphor, either. If [in magical-realist literature] a woman rises off the ground, that can be a physical or a spiritual rising. But both the physical and spiritual rising is real. It's realism. It just happens to be magical.'

Cruz found solace and adventure in the world of the imagination as a child growing up in Matanzas, Cuba in the 1960s'before he and his family boarded a freedom flight to Miami in 1970 (when the writer was 10). In fact, beautiful, intricately painted cigar boxes enthralled him'a theme that permeates Anna in the Tropics, where the cigar workers escape their grim reality through Tolstoy's novel and the world of their imagination. There also were parallels between cigar brands and literature: Many cigars were named after romantic novels.

'In Cuba,' shares Cruz, 'my childhood stopped a little bit.'

He recounts how, at school, he was forced to eat the only offering: a small bowl of 'really awful' watered-down chickpea soup. But, once his father was able to get meat from the black market, his family devised a strategy to allow the young Cruz to have a nutritious lunch at home. His mother asked one of the in-laws, a doctor, if he could diagnose the boy with an illness, like chronic hepatitis, that would enable him to be released from school at lunch time. The plan worked.

But, because Fidel Castro's streets were filled with 'committees' that observed people's behavior, Cruz had to pretend to be a frail and sick child. He couldn't even go out and play with his friends.

'My life became sheltered,' he says. 'So I started to invent my own little games. I imagined stepping into the landscapes painted on a cigar box. And that cigar box came back to me when I wrote Anna. I always loved language and words. I'd even write letters to my beloved, but I didn't have a beloved.'

He remained sensitive to the literary possibilities of romance languages in which each word has a gender. 'In Spanish,' he notes, 'I love that sea is both male and female'el mar and la mar.' His fascination with language did not stop when he settled in Florida. He counts Teresa Maria Rojas, director of Prometeo, a theatre program, at Miami-Dade Community College, as his first influential drama teacher. Cruz began taking her classes in 1982.

'Teresa Maria Rojas was an actor who happened to write poetry and embraced life like a poet,' explains Cruz. 'She told me to go ahead and become a playwright. She saw poetry in everything'especially in the mundane. And that's how she influenced me. One of my problems with academia is it's this way of looking at art through the intellect instead of the emotions.'

Cruz teaches playwriting at Yale University. But instead of deliberating over linguistic technicalities, he starts his class with hatha yoga exercises.

'That's how I prepare to write,' he continues. 'It's very important to be in touch with the body when I write, because the body is full of memories. It's like a fragrance. The stories are not just in my mind. Writing must come from a place as deep as the liver.'

Cruz has had his work developed and performed in several theatres across the country. Night Train to Bolina (set in Central America and centered on two poverty-stricken children whose playground is the village cemetery) received a W. Alton Jones Award and was produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. His Cuba-set A Park in Our House (in which a Russian visitor stirs up a family's values) was commissioned and produced by the McCarter Theatre, with subsequent productions at the Magic Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop. Dancing on Her Knees (about a transvestite who 'rumbas against the grip of death in the time of AIDS') was also developed at the Magic as part of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and was produced at the Public Theatre.

He has taught at Brown University and the University of Iowa. Two Sisters and a Piano (about two women living under house arrest in Cuba) received the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award and premiered at McCarter, then was produced at the Public Theatre. His latest play, Beauty of the Father, will receive its world premiere at Florida's New Theatre.

Cruz compares his writing process to an ancient concept in Asian painting. 'Asian artists would throw a blotch of paint on a sheet of paper and then give it form. I start with my own blotch of color. It could be an object I'm writing about'an object that has a history. I've always had a fascination with cigar boxes.'

That cigar box prompted Anna in the Tropics. Initially, Cruz wanted to set the play in the late 1800s'the time when factory lectores were instrumental in kick-starting the revolt that would liberate Cuba from Spain.

'I thought of making parallels between this historic moment and the new exiles,' says Cruz. 'But I felt these were big themes, and I needed to narrow it down. So I set Anna in 1929 [in Ybor City, Florida]'at the brink of change, when the first people being fired from the cigar factories were the lectors. I felt it marked the death of art in favor of productivity. We lose so much in this country for the sake of advancement and making money.'

According to Cruz, the lectores also served as a bridge to the world of literature, which liberated the workers and 'gave license to people who were illiterate'to empower them to use their imagination.' He was fascinated by the possibility of 'art in the workplace,' in addition to chronicling the history of Latinos. He laments the fact that, in the United States, the arts are typically the first to get cut'unlike other countries that are defined by art.

The playwright sees art in the full spectrum of life'from the birth of his daughter to enjoying a late-night dinner outside with his friends on a hidden street engulfed in drying laundry in Naples, to a graveyard, to the decorative label of a vintage cigar.

'I love life,' Cruz says modestly, without an exclamation point. 'I love its beauty and its defects. I want my work to embrace that.'

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