Despite Miami-Dade schools’ claim, there’s more sex in a telenovela than in Nilo Cruz’s prize-winning play | Opinion
It’s the “explicit” sex talk!
Or so we’re supposed to believe. This, apparently, is the reason why Miami-Dade County Public Schools has banned its high school students from attending free performances of the 20th-anniversary production of Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Anna in the Tropics.”
“It’s about explicit sexual content the District determined was not age-appropriate,” schools spokeswoman Jackie Calzadilla wrote me during a testy email exchange.
I don’t buy the simplistic explanation, not after the School Board refused last week to allow the teaching of two Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage and LGBTQ workplace rights in 12th-grade civics.
Plus, the reason for the Cruz decision, which should have been readily available to the public from the outset, is only being shared after much prodding by my questions.
Now, it seems, because the School District isn’t happy with my column disclosing that the celebrated Cuban-American playwright’s work is being censored, kept from students who should be studying this play for its historical and literary worth.
Other generations of Miami-Dade students have enjoyed matinee showings — and they likely went on to live their lives just fine. No brain damage.
“Have you read the script?” Calzadilla asks me. “It’s [sic] pretty intense depiction of sexually explicit scenes are enough to make this adult woman blush.”
Blush, really? These days — and in Miami?
The telenovelas that abuelas watch in front of small children have way more sexual content than Cruz’s play. To name one: half-nude William Levy having sex with an also scantily clad actress on a Mexican beach. On a hammock. In bed. Rinse and repeat in other dramas and reality shows, too.
There’s no such explicit sex onstage in the brilliant “Anna in the Tropics.”
I read the script MDCPS finds objectionable and saw the play at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in the early 2000s. Everyone swooned, gave it a rousing standing ovation.
What has stayed with me is how the elegant poetic language soars, scene to scene, carrying the story. The beauty and poignancy of the writing captivated me and easily took me back in time to a cigar-rolling factory in 1929 Ybor City, an industry and immigrant city on the brink of change.
By the time the story reaches the climactic scene that made Calzadilla’s face red, the ear is well-tuned to Cruz’s sometimes tender, sometimes exulting dramatic sentences. So, the conversation between the parting husband and wife about their sexual lives doesn’t set off any alarm bells.
But the decision by an academic division that should be educating, not censoring certainly does set off alarms for many others in Miami’s literary and arts community.
The misguided decision not to allow 17- and 18-year-olds to see Miami New Drama’s performances in January and February “is appalling,” said the widely respected former Miami Herald theater critic Christine Dolen on her Facebook page.
“ ’Anna in the Tropics’ is a work of art, a history lesson, an exploration of how literature and lives intersect. It is not age-inappropriate for high school students. That a significant, celebrated play and its creator would get caught up in the politicized culture wars being waged in Florida schools is mind-boggling,” she wrote.
Cruz on sex and violence
Monday night, Cruz sent me an excerpt of “the scene that they find offensive.” In it, the wife is being quizzed by her husband about her illicit affair with the cigar factory’s lector.
It’s too lengthy to quote here, but “interesting that they had no problem with the violence and killing of the lector,” Cruz said.
The lector reads aloud Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” as the cigar rollers work and ends up having an affair with the married woman among them, whose husband wed her because he owed her father a favor.
In this passage, the wife explains — using not crass language, but, rather, the language of yearning and desire — at her husband’s questioning, the things her lover does and says: “That I taste sweet and mysterious like the water hidden inside fruits and that our love will be white and pure like tobacco flowers. And it will grow at night, the same way that tobacco plants grow at night.”
Says Cruz: “Violence is OK. But not sexuality. No wonder we have guns in schools.”
Censorship
One of the telling features of censorship is that, too often, it is exercised in the dark, as MDCPS has done with Cruz’s play.
The perpetrators — those who mandate and execute to keep themselves safe from the wrath of the powers-that-be — don’t care to thoroughly explain the need for it because their arguments don’t stand the most rudimentary test.
And though there is the depiction of sex, this is no porno movie, not even an R-rated one.
“Notice that the censors don’t want to argue,” Cruz said in a post to my Facebook page. “Why can’t there be a dialogue? I welcome a conversation with the Public School Board. If there’s something indecent about my play, I want to protect the vulnerable as much as they do. I am also an educator who has taught at several universities, including Yale, NYU and Brown.”
When the play was presented at the Playhouse, “we used to tone-down the intimate scenes for the students that were attending the production, without being too Victorian or prude about it,” Cruz said. “But more than anything, we were mindful of being a little more discreet so professors and school administrators like Ms. Calzadilla didn’t blush and take away from the students the basic human rights of witnessing the wonders and power of live theater.”
“Anna in the Tropics” has been studied by students around the world and across this country, and the school district shuns a star playwright that it once celebrated for the sake of playing to the right-wing politics dictated by Tallahassee.
“I just hope we’re not going back to the cultural wars of the late 1990’s in this country,” Cruz said. “I hope that censorship doesn’t become the new norm, like it was behind the Iron Curtain and in places like China and Cuba.”
Miami has, for years, been a target of the right for its cosmopolitan art scene.
And now, given the current divisive state of Florida politics, it is no surprise that Cruz’s heralded play never had a chance of getting a fair hearing before school administrators deciding what kind of culture students can — and can’t — explore.
A win for censors, and a loss for students.
