1929 Tampa, Florida: the heart of Cuban America. When the handsome new ‘Lector’ arrives at a family-run cigar factory to read to the workers, not everyone is as delighted as the women when his novel of choice is the highly emotive Anna Karenina.

Pride and passions are already running high as the factory is threatened by the race to industrialise and join the American Dream. In the heat of the crowded factory floor, Tolstoy’s words of 19th Century Russian Romanticism inflame desires, inspire jealousies and force the familt to look to its future.

Nilo Cruz is a Cuban American playwright whose work has been produced widely across the USA. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003 and the Steinberg Award for Best Play for Anna in the Tropics.