annatropic “One should never alter other people’s destiny,” Ofelia admonishes daughter Marela as they wait for Juan Julian’s ship to arrive. But Juan Julian, the new lector (reader) for the family’s cigar factory, is unwittingly about to do just that.

The first book el lector chooses to read to the cigar-factory workers is Anna Karenina—and so we’re halfway to the title of Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics. As for the other half, the play takes place in Ybor City, a neighborhood of Tampa. Is Central Florida really in the Tropics? In any case, there you have it.

If you know that classic Tolstoy novel, you can guess what’s coming when three of the main characters of the play are a husband, his wanting-more-from-life wife, and a dashing stranger. But even if you don’t, Cruz steadily feeds you the bits you need from the mouth of el lector, as well as maybe leading us a bit too much by the nose with the gun/duel references.

Putting aside an egregious error near the end of the play that he knows is there and hopes you won’t notice (and that I can’t mention because it would be a spoiler), Cruz has done well enough in weaving particular place, time, and persons that when one of the main characters (damn my notes!) exhorts, “We work hard enough. We deserve all that life offers us,” Cruz has earned the empathy on which he’s banking. Does it matter that Cruz never really does anything with the tradition-vs.-modernization theme he obviously intends as a philosophical substratum? Not really. At core this is simply a human story, and that’s fine.

As such, the cast does a fine job. If there’s a standout, it’s probably Kesia Elwin, who makes the aforementioned wife smother, smolder, and quietly burst into flames. But when on opening night the cast encountered trouble lighting a cigar and rolled with the difficulty as a very normal thing that happens sometimes in real life, I wished this spirit had animated the entire play. As I say, everybody’s good, but if as the run progresses they let the page drift away and utter their lines with that kind of unconscious spontaneity, that will be something to see.

On the other hand, more than one actor on more than one occasion mispronounced lector as if it were Hannibal the Cannibal’s surname. Since clearly most (if not all) of the cast actually speak Spanish, I presume this was a strange manifestation of opening-night jitters.

Major kudos are due to John Novak and Peter Clifford, whose set, a fabric-and-wood vision of beige and brown (which the costuming and lighting perfectly accent), is wider than the theater is deep and functional as all get-out.

Director Denis McCourt has thought especially hard about the blocking on this one, and neither he nor the cast ever misstep. And that goes double for the many onstage tableaux, which give us a cinematic dimension that helps plant us firmly in the play’s humid vision of a yesteryear.

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