This weekend, the OU Lab Theatre presented five sold-out performances of Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Anna In The Tropics.”

The Lab Theatre is set in a small room within the Old Science building, recently opened after a long period of renovation. The entire theatre, from lighting booth to backdrop, is no bigger than a midsized classroom.

This was the perfect place to stage Anna.

The play is set in the year 1929 in Florida in a cigar factory owned by Santiago and his wife Ofelia, played by drama performance majors David Zamudio and Amy Claire Brown, respectfully.

The plot swirls around the arrival of a new lector, an educated man hired to read books aloud to factory workers to distract them from the tedium of their work.

The new lector Juan Julian, played by performance sophomore Jordan Matlock, has brought with him Leo Tolstoy’s book “Anna Karinina,” and begins to read it to the workers, whose reactions to the story reveal their life’s struggles.

The student actors do well with Cruz’s script, which seems a simultaneous analyis of Tolstoy’s text and the cultural conditions of these factory workers. The script clearly demanded passion beyond that of each character’s small life, requiring zeal for literary discussion as well.

Matlock’s reading of Tolstoy was sympathetic and passionate, revealing the character as still an impressionable young man. His portrayal of the lector allowed the audience to believe how wrapped up these workers would become in the book.

The daughters of the factory owners did indeed become wrapped up. Younger daughter Marela, played by Monica Gonzalez, found encouragement for her dreaming in the pages of the romance. Gonzalez’s portrayal of Marela was a bright light among the seriousness of the script. Older daughter Conchita played by Alexandra Gonzales, found desire for an impassioned affair.

Not all were as taken by this book as the sisters were. Worker Cheche, played by Marek Lara, half brother to Zamudio’s character, found it a constant reminder of his wife, who had run off with another lector. Lara’s scowl was almost comic in its ubiquitousness, until he allows all his bitter rage to manifest in the end.

The best performances of the night came in a scene between Zamudio and Brown, when the age-old fights of this couple brought them to silence, and only through the framework of the book which they had been hearing could they bring themselves to words and understanding. The scene ran the gambit of emotions; Zamudio and Brown took the audience with them through anger ,tears and affection.

“Anna In The Tropics” was a study of the jealousies born of the activation of imaginations and of the healing colloquies literature can create. Thanks to the skillful performances of the actors, this was a study that cannot be quickly forgotten.