SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Critic

FOR ANYONE who has ever been cold conked, over the moon, starry-eyed transported by listening to a good story, Nilo Cruz feels your wonderment and he has a dashing, white-suited, silver-tongued lector named Juan Julian to sizzle your butter. J.J. will read - and please hang on to those undergarments, ladies - Tolstoy's ``Anna Karenina.'' Which he'll pronounce ``Cah-re-NEE-na.''

Cruz will give you Juan Julian. What the playwright can't supply, at least where the L.A. premiere of his ``Anna in the Tropics'' is concerned, is a particularly interesting story. Sweaty, aromatic and textured, yes, but rarely electrifying, much less engaging. Despite all this familial heat coursing through the family-run cigar factory in Florida, they're actually kind of a boring lot.

Which is not really the production's fault. Director Richard Hamburger - whose staging of ``Anna'' at the Pasadena Playhouse is a co-production with Dallas Theatre Center and Arizona Theatre Company - seems to have all the necessary ingredients in place. Attractive miserable cast? Check. Hot reader? Check. Elongated revolving and highly versatile cigar-rolling table? At the ready.

Fire? Interest level? Alas, largely absent. What the Pulitzer Prize committee was thinking when they awarded this rather obvious melodrama its award for drama in 2002 is beyond comprehension. Maybe they were collectively smoking something stronger than a hand-rolled stogie.

In Pasadena, Al Espinosa's Juan Julian is afforded one of those ultra cool entrances. A panel-like window opens at the back of the stage and a tall, hatted figure, nattily dressed in white, stands in profile enveloped in cigar smoke. He then lopes forward into the scene. Cue the fluttering hearts.

We got the buildup one scene earlier. As factory owner Santiago (played by Apollo Dukakis) is having a bad run at the cockfights and unwisely signing business-related IOUs to his half brother, Cheche (Javi Mulero), Santiago's wife, Ofelia (Karmin Murcelo), and daughters Conchita (Jacqueline Duprey) and Marela (Adriana Gaviria) await, with schoolgirl zeal, the arrival of the new lector. When Juan Julian finally gets there, Marela is so flustered, she wets herself.

The lector is hired to read a story to help the factory's bunchers, stuffers, wrappers and rollers pass the workday. Juan Julian's choice of narrative, ``Anna Karenina'' is a fortuitous choice since the novel's plot begins to mirror the family dynamics. Juan Julian's affair with the unhappily married Conchita - they make love atop that aforementioned cigar-rolling table - echoes ``Karenina's'' Anna/Vronsky trysts. Except that Conchita's husband (Timothy Paul Perez) isn't powerless. In fact, the affair seems to sexually reinvigorate his marriage.

Cruz is also interested in elements of labor history. ``Anna'' is set in 1929, two years before lectors were permanently removed from the factories. Cheche, whose wife ran off with a lector, would like to see Juan Julian on the first boat back to Cuba. And he wants to bring machines into the factory, even at the cost of human jobs. Neither proposal is at all popular among the family, who largely consider Cheche a buffoon. Which he is - but he's a dangerous buffoon.

``Anna in the Tropics'' is a difficult play to connect with. It's been suggested that enough heat from Conchita and Juan Julian will ignite the rest of the play - passion and rage becoming contagious. This seems a doubtful proposition. The characters are so sketchy, so tied to the circumstances of the plot (Cruz's and, to a lesser extent, Tolstoy's) that they start to become one-note. Gaviria, as the Russia-worshipping Marela, and Mulero, as the seemingly ineffectual Cheche, turn in the strongest work. On the whole, Hamburger's production has plenty of smoke, but not enough fire.

Evan Henerson, [phone]

evan.henerson(at)dailynews.com

ANNA IN THE TROPICS - Two stars

Where: Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday; through Feb. 13.

Tickets: $41 to $51. Call [phone].

In a nutshell: Where there's smoke, there isn't always dramatic fire.