Finding Nilo: the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Nilo Cruz opens Anna in the Tropics in New York.

Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz has been perfecting his craft for 15 years and has 10 plays under his belt. But his life has changed completely since he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in April. His play Anna in the Tropics beat out the two other better-known finalists, The Goat and Take Me Out, by far better-known authors, Edward Albee and Richard Greenberg, respectively.

"It was a big shock for me," says the gay New Yorker, who recently turned 43, of whining the prize--the first Pulitzer for drama awarded to a Latino. "I'm hoping that this will open doors for other Latino writers."

Cruz's Pulitzer win was even more surprising since Anna hadn't been staged in New York. Now that has changed: The play just arrived on Broadway starring Jimmy Smits and Daphne Rubin-Vega.

Anna in the Tropics takes place in 1929 in a Tampa, Fla., cigar factory, where a lector (Smits) reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to workers, whose lives are dramatically changed by the novel. In crafting his tale about the power of art, love, and sexuality, Cruz was inspired by the Cuban lectores, whose job it was to read to the factory workers--a tradition that was also common in Tampa's Cuban factory neighborhood of Ybor City until the 1930s.

Cruz is well aware of the dramatic changes Anna has created in his own life. "Three days ago was my birthday," Cruz recalls. "I went to see a play on Broadway, and when I left, I walked by the marquee for Anna. I saw before me all those years of struggling as an artist. It was very emotional to see the name of the play and my name too. It was like a birthday gift for me."

Even though he's a Cuban exile who often writes about Cubans in America, Cruz doesn't think his plays are political. I'm more interested in humanity than anything," he says. "There are political elements in my work, but unlike some writers I don't have a political agenda."

Nor does his sexual identity drive his art. I'm interested in investigating sexuality in the same way Tennessee Williams was," Cruz allows. "[But] artists look at the world in a different way than other people--on the outside looking in, observing human behavior. I take that into consideration more than my sexuality or my gender."

While Anna explores what he calls "the complexity of heterosexuality," many of Cruz's plays have gay characters. Beauty of the Father (to begin in January at the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Fla., which commissioned Anna) concerns a triangle between a bisexual father, his daughter, and the father's ex-lover. "It's my version of The Graduate--except with a male character," Cruz says, half joking.

Cruz has earned his status as an outside observer. He arrived in the United States with his family at age 9 via one of the famed freedom flights to Miami sanctioned by the United States and Fidel Castro. He moved to New York City in 1990 to study with Maria Irene Fornes, then to Brown University to work with Paula Vogel. Now Cruz himself teaches playwright at Yale University, although he's taking a leave of absence this fall.

Anna is not the only Cruz play being performed this year: The Oregon Shakespeare Festival recently mounted Lorca in a Green Dress; Two Sisters and a Piano, which just toured in Britain, will be staged at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre starting in March.

Cruz's main problem now? All the post-Pulitzer excitement has crimped his writing time. Although he has been commissioned to write new plays and has fielded calls from Hollywood to adapt Anna for the screen, he hasn't signed any movie contracts. "There's a play I started before I got the award that I want to go back to," says Cruz. "I need to lock myself in a room in a country house and just finish it."

Stevenson has written for Entertainment Weekly and other publications.