UPlayers' Widows serves as a timely reminder
By Burton Taylor
Lance Writer
February 4, 2009
 This week marks the opening of the excellent production of “Widows,” a play by Ariel Dorfman.
“Widows” opens on a solitary figure sitting by the river, and who is as seemingly rooted to the place as the trees or bushes around her. This is Sophia Fuentes (Carolyn Lawrence). Her husband, her father, and her sons have all vanished.
She isn’t alone in this loss. Many of the women have also lost loved ones. Everyone tacitly knows that it was the military that took them, but none can safely say so and none know whether their loved ones still live or are long dead.
All of this has made Sophia a little bit batty. She believes that the river has answers for her. The other women all quickly dismiss her wild claims until one day a body washes ashore, which Sophia claims to be her father although the body is too decayed to be properly identified. To the local military, this mysterious body represents damning evidence against them and must be destroyed.
Set in modern Greece, the play harkens back to themes and issues that dominated Sophocles’ dramas. Sophia’s struggle to figuratively and literally bury the dead is little different from Antigone’s struggle to bury her brother.
Concurrent to the tale of these widows is the Conradian moral descent of the newly arrived Captain (Alexander Crowther) who has been detailed with governing the locals. Although appalled by the unspoken atrocities that his fellow men in uniform have inflicted for years upon this now decimated community, he quickly toes the party line once his own interests are threatened.
We don’t require George Lucas’ ham-fisted melodrama to guide us in this transformation. When the Captain finally begins musing about needing new kinds of people, his genocidal transformation to the “dark side” is complete.
Special praise must to be given to David Baker’s Lieutenant. He is a perverse kind of anti-Jiminy Cricket to the Captain’s Pinocchio. He deftly and shrewdly guides the Captain into a world of Newspeak and moral relativism.
Baker effortlessly and completely embodies this self-serving, serpent-tongued monster. Unlike his fellow soldiers, he feels no need to engage in self-delusion to justify the atrocities the army commits.
Baker was excellent in the University Players’ production of “Don Juan on Trial” in the fall, and he’s even better here. His Lieutenant and Lawrence’s striking Sophia provide the moral poles on which this political play turns.
Although set in Greece in 1942, the play looks beyond this particular time and place and speaks to a more universal experience of those who have suffered under totalitarian regimes.
For this reason, “Widows” is a challenging play to sit through. The audience’s sense of pity and shock during the performance was audible. Dorfman himself witnessed the kinds of terrors presented. He was an exile from Pinochet’s Chile.
“Widows” is a timely reminder that the collective optimistic aura of Obama and his promise of hope and change should not blind us to such appalling events either in the past or present.
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