Playwright Cruz, director Jonathan Muñoz-Proulx, and a topnotch cast transport A Noise Within audiences to another time, another place in a story that illustrates the power of the written word to transform, empower, inflame, and destroy human lives. Now partial owner of Santiago’s factory thanks to the latter’s gambling debts, Cheché would like nothing better than to modernize the establishment, including installing machines to do work now performed by hand and getting rid of any potentially wife-stealing lector.Īll Cheché needs now is the factory workers’ support, though that may be easier said than done.

Meanwhile at the Tampa harbor, Santiago’s wife Ofelia (Rose Portillo) and the couple’s two adult daughters Conchita (Tania Verafield), married to Palomo (Matias Ponce), and the still single Marela (Katie Rodriguez) find themselves eagerly awaiting the arrival of the factory’s new lector, hired to keep the workers entertained by reading aloud from literary classics like Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.Īnd who better to ignite similar adulterous lust amongst the three women than debonair hunk Juan Julian (Jason Manuel Olazábal), at least four decades younger than the late lamented Teodoro and oozing sex appeal that doesn’t sit well with Santiago’s half-brother Cheché (Gabriel Bonilla), whose wife Mildred left him for Teodoro’s immediate successor. The year is 1929 and the city is Tampa, a destination favored by Cuban émigrés whose skill at the centuries-old art of making cigars by hand has allowed them to forge new lives in factories like the one owned by Santiago (Leandro Cano), first seen mid-cockfight and losing money as fast as his bad luck will allow.

Illicit passions set a Florida cigar factory aflame in Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna Of The Tropics, the dramatic latest from A Noise Within.

Instaling Anna Karenina