Dorfman, a Chilean novelist in exile, introduces his novella with a
foreword aiming it directly at the political situation in Chile,
though the book itself is set in German-occupied WW II Greece. And
indeed the anger here registers beyond one place and time: the
story is deliberately unparticularized, universalized. Sofia
Angeles, an old Greek country matriarch, has been robbed of all her
family's men - father, husband, two sons - by the military
authorities, who accuse the Angeles men of being subversives. Now,
day by day, still other male bodies come floating down the local
river: bloated and unrecognizable corpses that the military
government wants quickly removed, hidden. However, the women of the
town, all 37 of them, the "widows" of the title, claim each body as
individually theirs - frustrating all attempts at disposal of such
evidence of wanton murder. To the officer in charge, this choral
and obdurate claim is "collective hysteria"; yet, as a tactic of
responsibility (and threat), it first haunts him - and then starts
to undo him. Dorfman presents the women (in black, huddled as one)
very visually, strongly conveying the stench of torture, of silent
reproach. His point, at the end, is made starkly: "There were the
bodies that someone was dumping with premeditated efficiency
upriver, the bodies that would go on turning up later, perhaps by
accident, in cesspools, ravines, crossroads, and they'd have to
keep killing so that no one would ask where they came from, who'd
put them there, why, how, how much longer." And though the story
becomes monotonous, with a single idea that never develops into
fully-characterized fiction, the 37 widows make for a powerful
image - in a thin yet vivid slice of polemical fable-telling.
(Kirkus Reviews)
A smouldering political allegory about a political protest in a
country ruled by a military junta. From the author of Death and the
Maiden, written in collaboration with Tony Kushner, author of
Angels in America. In a war-torn village the men have disappeared.
The women - their mothers, wives, daughters - wait by the river,
hope and mourn. Their anguish is unspoken until bruised and broken
bodies begin being washed up on the banks and the women defy the
military in the only form of protest left to them. Ariel Dorfman's
play Widows is based on his 1983 novel of the same name. The play
was first presented by the Traverse Theatre Company at the
Cambridge Arts Theatre in March 1997. (An earlier version of the
play was first performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in
July 1991).
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