Anna in the Tropics

The year is 1930 — the place Ybor City (Tampa), Florida. It is here where a Cuban-American family impatiently await the arrival of a new lector whose job is to read books aloud to the factory workers as they earnestly hand roll cigars. When Juan Julian, the lector, arrives and reads Tolstoy’s infamous love story of Anna Karenina, the workers as well as the family connect the story to their own lives. Some workers want to give up the tradition of the lector, but the culture of a lector is a custom that this immigrant family will not abandon. Adultery, money issues, and the potential for violence begins to erupt as the women in this close-knit family question what it is to live and what it means to be in a relationship. As for the men, they remain totally bewildered.

Join us and hear how Nilo Cruz, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for this play, weaves his own poetry with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. When it is all said and heard — you won’t be the same.