AND the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for drama goes to . . . Nilo Cruz.
The 42-year-old Cuban-American playwright’s “Anna in the Tropics” – a Latino variation on the Anna Karenina story, which has yet to be produced in New York – triumphed over Edward Albee’s “The Goat” and Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out.”
Albee, a three-time Pulitzer-winner and Greenberg, whose “Take Me Out” played to sold-out audiences at the Public Theater before moving to Broadway, were widely considered favorites but wound up as finalists.
Cruz got the word yesterday while waiting for a train in New Haven, where he’d just taught his once-a-week playwriting class at Yale.
“I feel like I’m taking a train to heaven!” he told The Post, as his cell phone flickered in and out en route to Manhattan.
“I called my mother immediately,” he said. “She’s turning 80 this year.
“She was the first person to give me a typewriter and she knew I was going to be a writer, so I feel I’m winning this award with her.”
“Anna in the Tropics” – which the Miami Herald called “a glistening tale of lust, literature and loss among Cuban-American cigar makers in Tampa’s Ybor City just before the Great Depression” – was commissioned by the 104-seat New Theater in Coral Gables, Fla.
On Saturday, it also took the $15,000 American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award, the top prize at the 27th annual Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky.
Before either this prize or the Pulitzer was announced, three productions of “Anna in the Tropics” were already in the works – including one at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., which holds the New York rights to the play.
“He’s been coming along, I have to say,” said Peregrine Whittlesey, Cruz’s agent.
“He comes from a family with no money and he’s managed to survive. He’s paying the bills as a playwright. And maybe now that this has happened, he’ll manage even better.”
Cruz emigrated from Cuba as an 11-year-old. Now single, he has a daughter in Pasadena, Calif.
Last night, he planned to celebrate with his friends in the city.
“Viva el teatro!” he shouted. “Long live theater!”
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Other prize winners
FICTION: “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides
Finalists: “Servants of the Map: Stories” by Andrea Barrett and “You Are Not a Stranger Here” by Adam Haslett
HISTORY: “An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943” by Rick Atkinson
Finalists: “At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America” by Philip Dray and “Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth Century America” by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
BIOGRAPHY: “Master of the Senate” by Robert A. Caro
Finalists: “The Fly Swatter” by Nicholas Dawidoff and “Beethoven: The Music and the Life” by Lewis Lockwood
POETRY: “Moy Sand and Gravel” by Paul Muldoon
Finalists: “Music Like Dirt” by Frank Bidart and “Hazmat” by J.D. McClatchy
GENERAL NON-FICTION: “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” by Samantha Power
Finalists: “The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art and Spirit” by Ellen Meloy and “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” by Steven Pinker
MUSIC: “On the Transmigration of Souls” by John Adams
Finalists: “Three Tales” by Steve Reich and “Camp Songs” by Paul Schoenfield
