La Viuda (The Widow)

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María Irene Fornés’ last play, Letters from Cuba (2000), was set in Cuba, the home of her birth, including missives sent to Fornés in New York by her brother in Havana. Ironically, it now turns out that her first play, the unpublished La Viuda (The Widow), written in Spanish in 1960, was inspired by letters sent to Cuba to her great-grandfather David from a cousin who had moved to Spain. While La Viuda had a one-night staging at The Actors Studio in 1960 in a lost translation by Fornés herself, Dogteam Theatre Project in its inaugural season at the Atlantic Stage 2 is offering its first full English language stage production. It is directed and translated by Olga Sanchez Saltveit, co-artistic director of the new company and assistant professor at Middlebury College, Vermont.

Like Letters from Cuba, La Viuda is also inspired by family letters that had come into her hand. In this her first play, 70-year-old Angela Martin living in Seville, Spain, writes to her cousin David in Cuba during the years 1899-1902 to both get news of her estranged husband Francisco de Arenal (known as Paco) and to set the record straight. In the course of these years, Paco living in Cuba becomes incapacitated and then passes away, and Angela discovers that she has been left out of the newspaper obituaries as well as his will having been separated from him since 1861.

While the majority of the play is Angela dictating her letters back to Cuba to a silent clerk, flashbacks occur behind her (Paco’s one day visit to Seville, their son Salvador (who died young) seen at ages five and 17, her lawyer Manuel Alvarez, a visit from her confessor Father Cravet, etc.). Unacceptable to Angela’s parents, Paco is a left wing, revolutionary journalist who is unable to keep her in the style she is accustomed to, and she has returned to live with her parents. When Angela follows her family when they move to Spain fleeing the ten year’s war for Cuban independence (1868-1878), Paco first moves to Paris, then New York and finally back to Cuba under the American occupation.

The theme of women in crises created by the men in their lives is one that would appear in many of Fornés’ later plays. Here however, while Angela fights to regain her dignity, the playwright seems to be saying that it is this very conservative claim to dignity which destroyed her marriage and the life of her son. Like many of Fornes’ later plays, it begins realistically and then slides into surrealism. Several of the named characters do not speak or have only a few lines each. Some of Fornes’ more dreamlike stage directions are ignored by Saltveit, while the director has added several of her own.

Although the play is mainly a one-person show, Saltveit has cleverly staged it to appear to have more action than written. One unsolvable problem is that Fornes has called for the role of the 70-year-old Angela to be played by a young man which this production has accommodated. While Jay Romero gives the role his all, he is neither entirely convincing as an octogenarian nor does he have the technique to carry it off. On the other hand, Jesse Muñoz as the young Paco is quite charming as he attempts to win his wife back from his opposing and traditional in-laws.

Several of the other characters have either very little to do or their roles remain undefined. Although Bri Beach in a luscious pink gown is an animated Moncita who writes to Angela giving her news of Paco’s doings, we never know whether she is a sister, a friend or a relative or where she is writing from, Havana, New York or elsewhere. Zack Maluccio as the 17-year-old Salvador is fine but we are never told what it is that causes his early death.

Mark Evancho has designed the attractive set and props. The writing room in Angela’s establishment suggests great wealth as well as allows for the surreal events of the later part of the play. Summer Lee Jack’s period costumes are quite beautiful placing Angela in all black and the other characters in tropical colors. Madison Middleton’s sound design and original compositions include period-style music as well as the sound of a bell ringing to mark the scene divisions. The lighting by Calvin Anderson subtly changes as the play requires.

María Irene Fornés’ rediscovered La Viuda is a valuable addition to her better known canon. It is a challenging play in that it is basically an 80-minute monologue with other characters in flashback occasionally interrupting Angela’s narration. Director Olga Sanchez Saltveit makes a fine case for this play with a spirited and lively production but she has not solved all of the play’s inherent problems. Performed in repertory with Sam Collier’s A Hundred Circling Camps, La Viuda is a worthy part of Dogteam Theatre Project’s inaugural season.

La Viuda (in repertory with A Hundred Circling Camps, July 9 – August 4, 2024)

Dogteam Theatre Project

Atlantic Stage 2, 330 W. 16^th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.dogteam.org

Running time: 85 minutes without an intermission