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Ode to Ybor

USF professor Denis Calandra shares his love for his adopted hometown through his play Cuban Bread, set in 1930s-era Tampa.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published April 7, 2005

[Times photo: Keri Wiginton]

Sherrica Matchett performs the role of Saura La Tentadora Rodriguez during dress rehearsal for Cuban Bread Monday at USF. In the background: Burton Tedesco, left, and David Black.

TAMPA - Denis Calandra's play Cuban Bread, set in Ybor City in the 1930s, is about politics and passion, history and community. And something more.

"I don't want to sound too corny," the University of South Florida theater professor says, "but the play is a kind of love song to Ybor and to Tampa."

Cuban Bread is part of Arte 2005, the Tampa Bay area's six-week celebration of art in the Americas. The play opens tonight in USF's Theatre 2 with a student and professional cast of 20 and live music by the local trio Cuban Social Club.

Calandra, 62, says that when he wrote the play in 1988, it was focused on the struggle in the 1930s between the cigar workers' unions and Tampa's power structure, a struggle that shook the cigar industry, then one of the city's largest. "Those were politically fraught times."

While writing the play, Calandra interviewed many of the former cigarmakers. "I talked to people of all political persuasions, all races. Each interview was another revelation. It all impressed on me the incredibly rich cultural heritage this town had."

He learned a great deal about Ybor City's sometimes contentious history and its vibrant community. "A lot of it's gone now. You just get all the Bourbon Street baloney. But under the crust, it's still there. It's more than just nostalgia."

Cuban Bread had one workshop production, but then, Calandra says, "I fell among administrators." While he was chairman of USF's theater department for nine years, the play sat in a drawer.

In 2001, he took it out. "After I stepped down from being chair, I thought, "I don't want to write another academic book.' "

He began to "dicker and revise." In 2003, he took a trip to Havana to get a firsthand look at Cuba and its culture. When he heard about Arte 2005, he says, "I figured the play was a natural."

The Cuban Bread that audiences will see is very different from the first version, Calandra says. "The changes I made were significant. I brought in more of a family focus, a stronger plot. There is a political overlay, certainly, but I shifted gears more to the human interest."

The play's central character is Alfonso Rivera, a lector, or reader, in one of the cigar factories. He is a former political radical who lost his job, and much more, in an earlier round of upheaval in Ybor City 10 years before.

"When I first heard of the institution of the lector, I thought it was a curious and wonderful thing," Calandra says. The lector was both an educator and a performer, whose job of reading newspapers and novels for the workers as they rolled cigars called for him to inform and entertain them.

Of course, another well-known recent play focuses on an Ybor City lector: Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics.

Calandra happened to read about Cruz's play winning the Pulitzer as he was returning from Cuba. He says the resemblances between the plays are mostly superficial.

Anna in the Tropics "is about a lector, and it's set in Ybor. But Nilo Cruz was writing a romance that uses the exotic background of Tampa."

"It's good that at least the lector in Tampa gets on the map. On the other side of the coin, it can be said that if, in fact, Tampa is remembered by a romance using it as an exotic background, that would be too bad.

"I'm waiting for the movie or the play or the book that really captures Tampa."

Cruz wrote Anna in the Tropics before he had ever visited Tampa. Calandra, who was born in New York City, lived in Germany and England before he came to USF in 1978. "I've lived in Tampa the longest of any place in my life."

Although his characters are fictional, Calandra borrows from history for some of the play's plot. Several scenes are based on an incident at Tampa's Labor Temple in November 1931, when a police officer was shot and wounded during a rally and 11 people were arrested, and the resulting trial.

Calandra also borrowed from a "beautifully written" editorial by Victoriano Manteiga, who founded Ybor City's newspaper La Gaceta in 1922. Victoriano's grandson, Patrick, runs the paper today.

Calandra's lector, Rivera, is very much a part of the community, unlike Cruz's lector, who comes from Cuba after he is hired. "Cruz just got that wrong. He has the lector being hired by the factory owners. That would never have happened; the lectors were hired by the workers."

That fact is essential to Cuban Bread; the lectors were often political forces because of their independence from management, and Rivera finds himself suspected of being a rabble-rouser even as he tries to keep his distance from politics.

He is also drawn in by his relationship with his former lover, Rosa Ramirez, who is still a radical. "In the end, they dance, it's all beautiful," Calandra says.

And Rivera cannot resist passing along his ideals to Rosa's young nephew, Luis, sharing with him a pantheon that has room for Cuban independence leader Jose Marti, Don Quixote and Babe Ruth.

"His main mission is to educate the next generation. He has notions of gentle anarchy," Calandra says.

The role of Rivera will be played by David Mann, a new faculty member in USF's theater department. Originally, he was the play's director, but he stepped into the lead after another actor left the role.

"David is still the director of the play. I'm his associate director," Calandra says. He hasn't directed a full production of a play since 1993, but he's enjoying the process.

It is especially interesting helping to direct a play he wrote. "Writing is revising, and once you're in rehearsals, it's revising quadrupled."

Calandra says that although Cuban Bread is set more than 70 years ago, many of the play's issues remain alive. Racism was a powerful element of the strikes in 1931: "This was the Deep South. One reason the strike was brutally broken up by police was the workers' banners, which showed black and white hands shaking.

"Their slogan was "Black and white, unite to fight.' They were quoting Jose Marti. Even today, you know, Castro can quote Marti and so can the right-wing guys in Miami."

The play also pivots on the issue of how far the right to free speech extends in times of political turmoil, an issue Calandra says is just as timely now. "We still haven't managed a balanced democracy."

Cuban Bread, he says, is meant to embody those issues in the lives of the people on stage. "What's important to me is to show my students that history is not some dead issue or memorized fact. It's alive."

-- Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com

Cuban Bread, a play by Denis Calandra, today through April 17, Theatre 2, Tampa Campus, USF, 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa. 8 p.m. today-Saturday and Wednesday-April 16, 3 p.m. Sundays. $12, $6 seniors and students. (813) 974-2323; artsmart.usf.edu.

[Last modified April 6, 2005, 10:15:09]