Cigar factories inspire playwrights

It’s a play about a lector -- a man who reads to the workers of a Cuban American cigar factory in Tampa, Fla., in the early 1930s.

Is it “Anna in the Tropics,” the play that won the Pulitzer Prize last year and went on to productions at South Coast Repertory and on Broadway?

Wrong. “Anna” is set in 1929, not the early ‘30s.

No, this play is called “Cuban Bread,” and it fits the above description in every other detail -- as does “Anna.”

Denis Calandra, who wrote “Cuban Bread” and saw a workshop production of it mounted in 1988 at the University of South Florida campus where he teaches theater, isn’t alleging plagiarism or anything improper on the part of “Anna” author Nilo Cruz or anyone else. He has never met Cruz, nor has he seen or read “Anna.”

“You can’t copyright ideas,” he says.

For his part, Cruz said Wednesday that he had never heard of “Cuban Bread” or of Calandra.

Soon after the 1988 workshop, the Odyssey Theatre in L.A. was among the playhouses to which Calandra sent a copy of the script. Jan Lewis, then the Odyssey’s literary manager, remembers reading the play and thinking it was very good. She can’t recall why it didn’t make it to the Odyssey stage. But she says that when she heard about “Anna,” she immediately thought of “Cuban Bread.”

There are many differences between the plays. “Cuban Bread” has a larger cast and is more politically oriented than “Anna.” The lector in “Cuban Bread” is reading “Don Quixote,” not “Anna Karenina.”

Still, the similarities are striking enough that when Calandra heard about “Anna,” he says, he “felt like the guy who went to the publisher with a white whale story a week after ‘Moby-Dick’ came out.”

However, he says, “after a couple days of bitterness, I thought it might end up as a good thing” -- perhaps “Anna” will inspire playgoers to want to hear more about the lectors in Tampa cigar factories seven decades ago. Calandra hopes “Cuban Bread” will finally receive a full production in Tampa in 2005.

-- Don Shirley