The Long Beach Shakespeare Company presents Anna in The Tropics, the Pulitzer-Prize winning play by Nilo Cruz and directed by Denis McCourt. MFA.
April 8th thru May 14th
Fridays and Saturdays @8pm; Sundays @2pm
Buy tickets at
www.lbshakespeare.org
When Cuban immigrants brought the cigar-making industry to Florida in the 19th Century, they carried with them another tradition. As the workers...
[read more] The Long Beach Shakespeare Company presents Anna in The Tropics, the Pulitzer-Prize winning play by Nilo Cruz and directed by Denis McCourt. MFA.
April 8th thru May 14th
Fridays and Saturdays @8pm; Sundays @2pm
Buy tickets at
www.lbshakespeare.org
When Cuban immigrants brought the cigar-making industry to Florida in the 19th Century, they carried with them another tradition. As the workers toiled away in the factory hand rolling each cigar, the lector, (historically well-dressed and well-spoken), would read to them. It was the lector who informed, organized and entertained the workers until the 1930s, when the rollers and the readers were replaced by mechanization.
Ybor City, a section of Tampa, was the center of the cigar industry, and it serves as the setting for Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize-winning play.
Anna in the Tropics is set in 1929. The play focuses on the effects of mechanization, the Great Depression and the advent of cigarettes on the cigar industry in Ybor City - the cigar capital of the world. The economic threat that these three factors pose to the factory workers is interwoven with a story of love and betrayal exacerbated by "el lector" - the reader - who is hired to read to the factory workers.
