Ana en el trópico by Nilo Cruz

Ana en el trópico (2002) by the Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  The action takes place in an old Cuban-American tobacco factory in Tampa, Florida in 1929.  The workers in the factory enjoy a long tradition in which a reader reads aloud classic works of literature while they make cigars by hand.  The arrival of a new reader who reads Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina provokes different reactions among the listeners that lead to a dramatic end.  This play invites us to return to a past time before the arrival of machines in tobacco factories and when reading aloud inspired people to dream of other worlds.