María Irene Fornés was a thirty-year-old aspiring New York painter visiting relatives in her native Cuba with her then-lover Susan Sontag, when she stumbled upon a cache of old letters. They launched her prolific and influential career as a playwright. 

The letters were written to her great-grandfather in Cuba from a cousin living in exile in Spain at the end of the 19th century.

The play those letters inspired, “La Viuda,” is receiving its first-ever English translation,  as “The Widow,” more than sixty years after its Spanish-language debut, in a first-rate production by a new Off-Broadway theater company.

“The Widow” is arguably about forbidden love, with a moral lesson that is not about the wages of sin, but rather the price of propriety.  It is also about the sacrifices made for liberty, as illustrated by several disruptive moments in Cuban history.

But those who know Fornés, who was a leading figure in the downtown experimental theater scene for decades,  won’t be surprised to learn that such themes need to be discerned (or guessed at?) through the opaque scrim of the play’s unconventional storytelling . “I have never once in writing a play,” she once said, “given a thought about what the scene’s about or what I want to say to the audience.”

“The Widow” begins with Angela Martin at 70 years old (portrayed, per Fornés suggestion, by a male actor, standout Jay Romero.)

In an elegant room in her home in Seville, Spain, Angela dictates letters to a silent clerk (Zeph Santiago.) The letters are intended for Angela’s cousin David (never seen) back in Cuba. Angela is asking David to inquire about the health of her husband, Francisco de Arenal, but to make the inquiries discreetly: “I must maintain a reserve of propriety in all that concerns this rabble.” 
It is 1899, after the Spanish-American War led to the U.S. occupation of a newly independent Cuba.  We soon learn that Angela had left Cuba – and her husband — for Spain three decades earlier, seeking safety during another war, the Ten Years War,  when Cubans fought for independence from Spain.
Angela initiated her correspondence because she heard that Arenal (whom she calls Paco) has suffered a stroke; she also is interested in the rental properties she still owns in Cuba, and whether the changed political situation will improve the economic picture.  

A little later, David informs Angela that Paco has died. As Angela’s correspondence continues over the next several years, we learn that she is consumed with outrage that Paco took a new wife, with whom he had many children. She insists she is still his wife, and demands to be listed as such in his obituary; divorce is not legal in Spanish or Cuban society. But, David tells her, Paco became a citizen of the United States, where divorce is legal.

The scenes of Angela’s letter-writing alternate with flashbacks with characters from her past, including young Angela herself, and Paco (Jesse Muñoz), who as a crusading journalist and revolutionary came into conflict with Angela’s wealthy father Don Modesto (Fidel Vicioso, who also plays Angela’s priest.)

We also see their son Salvador at both age 5 and 25, a neighborhood gossip, and a couple of male admirers. It eventually becomes clear – to me, anyway – that Angela is an unreliable narrator,  certainly not the character with whom we are encouraged to identify. “They tell me his health couldn’t bear the disgust of witnessing the arrival of the Americans in Cuba,” Angela says of Paco at one point. “But I believe it is the illness of a remorseful conscience for having lived like a libertine.”

It’s easy to argue that Fornés, who had to hide the nature of her relationship with Sontag on her visit to Cuba, is most likely to have identified with Paco, a libertine perhaps in the eyes of conventional moralists of the era, but one dedicated to love and to liberty. 

The performance I happened to attend of “The Widow” had an audience fairly full of nine-year-olds. They were all apparently students at the Triple Promise Academy for the Performing Arts based in Bay Ridge, there to root for one of their classmates, who plays Child Sebastian. I was impressed how attentive they were, with only minimal fidgeting and whispering, and I wondered whether Fornés’ plays are more accessible than I have given them credit for.  

in the years since her death in 2018 at the age of 88, her work has received renewed attention, with lovingly produced recent revivals of “Promenade,” her 1965 satirical musical with composer Al Carmines, “Fefu and her Friends,” her pioneering immersive and “pro-feminine” 1977 play, and “Sarita,” her 1984 dark musical about an exploited teenager, all of which I enjoyed, and didn’t feel the need to understand fully.

“The Widow” continues in that recent tradition, the first production of The Dogteam Theatre Project, a new company that matches professional theater makers with theater students from Middlebury College. Late in the play, the entire cast one after the other serenely and surreally don elaborate mourning veils that drop from the ceiling, just like the one Angela has been wearing. I can’t explain why this happens, but it felt exactly right.

La Viuda (The Widow)
Dogteam Theater Project at Atlantic Stage 2 through August 4
Running time: 80 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $33.85 ($23.18 for students, seniors and military)
Written by María Irene Fornés 
Translated and directed by Olga Sanchez Saltveit 
Scenic design by Mark Evancho, costume design by Summer Lee Jack, lighting design by Calvin Anderson, sound design by Madison Middleton
Cast: Jay Romero as Angela, Zeph Santiago as The Clerk, Jesse Muñoz as Francisco de Arenal, Fidel Vicioso as Fr. Cravet/Modesto, Katelyn Wenkoff as Good Angela, Jacob Joseph Medina as Young Salvador, Zack Maluccio as Salvador, Bri Beach as Moncita, Jose-Maria Aguila as Manuel, Ethan Fleming as Casimiro Paz