Nilo Cruz is the most produced Cuban American playwright in the United States and was the first dramatist of Hispanic descent to receive the Pulitzer Prize. In his plays, Cruz almost always journeys back to Cuba, even when the play is not set there. Cruz is a sensualist, a conjurer of mysterious voyages and luxuriant landscapes. He is a poetic chronicler, a documentarian of the presence of Latin people in American life. He conveys the strength and...

This lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Cruz imagines the catalytic effect the arrival of a new "lector" (who reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to the workers as they toil in the cigar factory) has on a Cuban-American family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land.