by AMY BARRATT

Despite the smelly, cancer-causing reality, there's a lot of romance surrounding the Cuban cigar. Legend has it that each one has been rolled on the naked thigh of a beautiful girl. There are beautiful girls in Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, Centaur Theatre's season opener, but they roll tobacco leaves into cigars on tables, not on their nubile flesh. And although the cigars are "Cuban" they're being manufactured in Florida.

The play is set in 1929 in Ybor City, a suburb of Tampa that grew up around a cluster of cigar factories at the turn of the last century. Owned by Cuban immigrant Santiago (played by Manuel Aranguiz), the factory where Anna is set employs not just Cuban, but Spanish, Italian, German and Jewish immigrants, as well as all the members of Santiago's extended family.

Cruz's story is inspired by the historical tradition, brought from Cuba to America, of hiring readers, or lectores in these factories to entertain the workers while they performed their repetitive tasks. The play begins with the arrival of a new, rather dashing, lector, an event that causes so much excitement among the female workers, young and old, that one actually pees herself.

The program notes tell us that in the 1920s, more and more women entered the cigar factories, and their presence affected the kinds of material chosen by the lectors. The new arrival, Juan Julian (David McNally), whose matinée idol looks and dulcet tones are perfectly suited to his profession, pleases all of the women, if not all of the men, when he begins to read aloud from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Cruz has his characters speak in a heightened poetic language that would probably be easier to pull off in Spanish. Anglophones aren't used to speaking this way and not all of the actors in Centaur's production, directed by Gordon McCall, are capable of making the language their own. Even worse, a couple of the actors are visibly floundering, unable to adequately convey their characters or their goals.

Commendably, McCall has gone way outside of his usual comfort zone in casting this show with performers from diverse backgrounds, not one of whom has ever worked at Centaur before. In particular, I thank him for introducing the devastating Tania Kontoyanni to the English theatre audience (she has worked extensively in French-language TV and radio). Quebec City native Kontoyanni plays Conchita, a factory worker whose life begins to parallel the story of Anna Karenina. There is not a false note in the actress's portrayal of this passionate, sensual character, part Anna, part Carmen.

On the whole, the production, and to some extent the play itself, romanticizes the lot of the factory workers in a bewildering way. We see them dreaming of the splendours of imperialist Russia, but get very little sense of the monotony they wish to escape. Even the smothering heat inside the factory, frequently mentioned in the script, fails to come across. The set, by Anne Séguin-Poirier, though lovely to look at, gives the actors far too much room to spread their wings. Eight actors is a fairly large cast, but they cannot, on the broad Centaur II stage, give the sense of claustrophobia that the text surely demands.

Kontoyanni is the name to remember here, and reason enough on her own to see this well-meaning, but flawed production.

Anna in the Tropics runs until Oct. 24 at Centaur Theatre (453 St-François-Xavier) $20–$40, 288-3161

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