'Widows' bleak, beautiful and brilliant

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH That's not an actor he's berating. That's a sleepy audience member. You've been warned.

A lesser play might have withered in the bleakness of this setting, but Ariel Dorfman's Widows radiates. Against a barren, minimalist backdrop at the University Theater, the actors of the Dramat strike a presence—they impart the torturous expectancy that envelops Dorfman's "perverse fairy tale." A collaboration with playwright Tony Kushner, the script is influenced by Dorfman's own experience as a Chilean citizen in exile and bears Kushner's fantastical stamp. The dialogue seldom dips into sentimentality, but lingers timelessly in a world where "the not knowing is a peculiar kind of hell." This devastating limbo is the crux of the play, and the performances do not distract: the acting is harmonized and understated. For this reason, Widows has earned its place on the very short list of very long plays that are actually worth three hours of sitting on a folding chair.

Sofia Fuentes (Megan O'Sullivan, PC '01) has been sitting even longer. One of 36 widows in a war-ravaged country, the old woman still waits by the riverside for the return of her father, husband, and sons—dead or alive. The men of her village are all missing political prisoners. The newly arrived military officials are ready to forget the past and implement their new governmental programs. Suddenly, the river washes up an unidentifiable body. The desperation of Fuentes then emerges full-force: she claims the body as her father's and declares the right to put doubt to rest in a proper burial.

O'Sullivan exhibits a masterful command over the character of Fuentes—her voice alone resonates with age and strength. Her performance is also subtle: physical quirks such as the woman's limp and the projection of her dialogue are not overly exaggerated. The resilience of her personality is expressed just as intensely in her silences and forceful stares. Another standout is the Captain (Ben Vershbow, BR '01), whose haunted look belies his officiality and attempted "objectivity" in balancing the widows with his own ambitions. His curt mannerisms play well off Fuentes' stony glare in their first encounter by the river, in which the irreconcilable disparity of their worlds is laid bare.

The entrance of the narrator (Nate Schenkkan, BR '02), an exiled journalist, effectively throws in some Brechtian-style objective commentary to momentarily wrench the audience from the world they are observing. Schenkkan's brusque, agitated speech and his disjointed movements contrast well with the more fanciful dialogue of the characters that he has, perhaps, been imagining all along. The direction places his monologues immediately in front of the audience, which further severs his existence from the people of his onstage story, left behind in his mysterious country.

While these characters are well-sculpted by the direction, with a mind for both their individual personalities and the ubiquitous truths that they embody, occasionally the choreography appears a bit too awkward. Movement is central to the characters of this play, both as a way of coping with time through methodical tasks and as an expressionistic portrayal of emotions. In one scene, Fuentes shouts out the names of the men who have vanished from the village, and through movement the widows onstage portray their emotional turmoil—they cry out and move abruptly in short sprints. However, here the choreography seems awkwardly executed and insufficiently developed.

In a later dream sequence, the choreography is better fitted to the spirit of the scene: Fidelia (Erin Beirnard, PC '03) recounts the army's seizure of her brother Alexis to the figure of her father, who sits with his hands tied across his back, writhing in a black mask. The synchronized movements of the other widows around her as she relates her story are simply coordinated and graceful, without overly distracting artificiality.

Sound and lighting effects also enhance onstage actions, without becoming overpowering presences. The strumming of a guitar, the lapping of the river water, and the flickering fire-glow of the lights expand the mystical atmosphere.

But what is perhaps most mystifying is how this play manages to convey over three hours of drawn-out anguish and mute sorrow while still captivating its audience. "It's like they're in love with death—begging me to pull the trigger," the Captain remarks of the long-suffering widows. A little observation from the exiled journalist: to attract the world's attention to the plight of his people, a writer needs a hook. And here he has it: Dorfman's Widows

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