Season Select: Anna in the Tropics

Posted March 4, 2025

Anna horiz

Anna in the Tropics

By Nilo Cruz

Directed by Robert Ramirez

Fast Facts

Playing: Hill Theatre | August 1 - September 26
Featuring: Phoebe González, Elizabeth Ledo, Melisa Pereyra, Ronald Román-Meléndez, Triney Sandoval
Genre: Romance/ Contemporary Drama
Last Seen at APT: First Time!
Go If You Liked: The River Bride (2022), A View from the Bridge (2017), The Seagull (2014)

About Anna in the Tropics

Get swept away on the tobacco-sweet breeze of this lush and poetic romance, as family ties smolder beneath a Florida sun. An alluring new lector has arrived in their midst like a match in a powder keg, carrying with him the long-held Cuban tradition of reading aloud as the workers roll cigars. They burn through their work days rapt in his reading of Anna Karenina. But not everyone is a fan of the tradition or the man. As desires ignite and loyalties are tested, each lyrical passage pulls them closer to a reckoning between the past and the future. A pulse-racing, Pulitzer-winning epic, offering a limited number of performances, perfectly accompanied by the sultry summer breeze. Runs August 1 - September 26.

Anna in the Tropics has been on our TBP (To Be Performed) list for a while now.

First, in early 2020, a reading of the play was featured in our Winter Words line-up. Directed by Core Company Actor Melisa Pereyra, she shared in her program notes that Anna in the Tropics is “about people who read, and people who listen…a story about fear, and love, and hope, and progress, and tradition. And most importantly, about a family changed by the power of the spoken word.”

One of the final in-person events at APT before the COVID-19 shutdown, the Anna in the Tropics reading stuck with us long past the end of that cold winter evening. Now, over five years later, Anna returns for another bow, this time in the Hill Theatre.

Melisa Pereyra directs rehearsal for 2020 Winter Words reading of Anna in the Tropics. Photo by Hannah Jo Anderson.



Nilo Cruz wrote Anna in the Tropics while a playwright-in-residence at Florida’s New Theatre during their 2001-2002 season. Similar to his previous work, Anna in the Tropics explored Cruz’s connection to Cuban-American heritage and tradition. The play is set in Ybor City, a historic neighborhood of Tampa, in the late golden age of the cigar industry. Once known as "the cigar capital of the world," Ybor City was a manufactural powerhouse in the late 19th and early 20th century, owned and operated by primarily Cuban and Spanish immigrants. A vibrant, bustling district, Ybor City once boasted over 150 cigar factories powered by some 10,000 employees who found community through social and mutual aid clubs.

Perhaps one of the most culturally significant roles within the cigar factories at the time was that of "el lector." Dating back to 1865, Havana's cigar factory employees would hire a lector to read from newspapers and novels while they rolled cigars, entertaining and educating the factory floor for hours every day. When factories began to open in Florida in the late 1880s, Cuban workers brought the tradition with them as the moved to the United States. The lector would often translate novels and articles to Spanish, acting as conduit for the workers and the outside world. Lectors were beloved by the factory employees, who paid for the reader's salary, but often merely tolerated by factory owners, who blamed lectors for a series of strikes after sharing news stories of other regional factories leading protests or walkouts. As part of an agreement following the Ybor City cigar makers' strike of 1931, the lector system came to an end. Lector Victoriano Mantegia went on to establish La Gaceta, a trilingual newspaper still in publication today.

Twenty years after the play’s original premiere in New Theatre’s 2002-2023 season, Cruz directed Anna at Miami New Drama, saying the play “focuses on the importance of literature and how literature can offer possibilities, offer change in our lives. Literature as a vehicle to meditate and reflect on our lives.”

In 2003, Anna in the Tropics received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a historic achievement for a number of reasons. With the win, Nilo Cruz became the second Latino playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (following Nicholas Dante for 1976’s winner, A Chorus Line). The win was also considered somewhat of an underdog story, as the play had only been produced once in Florida, while other finalists - Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg and The Goat or Who is Sylvia? By Edward Albee - had produced New York City runs.

Since the win, Anna in the Tropics had a 2003-2004 Broadway run, followed by a US national tour and several international productions, including a Spanish-language adaptation “Ana en el trópico” translated and directed by Cruz himself in 2005.