Two widows, gossiping about their deceased husbands, suddenly discover that each of them had a relationship with the other's husband. From a sublime and melancholic situation, it turns into a humorous one.
"The Widows" was written after a five-year hiatus in my playwriting career. (...) Towards the end of 1989, I found myself in Mexico. Together with my wife, Susan Osorio, I settled on a mountain ranch called La Epifania. (...) After a year of renovation and building the ranch, I underwent a difficult and dangerous operation, something related to cardiology, and the recovery lasted another year. After the recovery, between January and April 1992, I wrote "The Widows." The situation of life-threatening danger and the Mexican culture, where death is not a taboo but rather openly discussed as something familiar and everyday, and where it is present in the upbringing of children from an early age, undoubtedly contributed to the creation of this play. Although this is not the first time that Mrożek addresses the theme of death (death has always been present in Mrożek's works - in the form of danger, murder, attempted suicide), in "The Widows," Mrożek places death at the center of the play for the first time. "The Widows" is Mrożek's return to the theater of the absurd; it is a certain allegory of theater in which the Waiter takes on the role of a playwright and prompter. It represents a turning point towards black comedy, a pessimistic vision of a world inseparably linked to death, although the absurd dialogue and action give the play an ironic meaning. The drama begins with the encounter of two widows who are connected by the common death of their husbands. It turns out that they not only buried their husbands but also their lovers. The dialogue resembles mechanical babbling, a typical stereotypical conversation that, in its construction, resembles the famous dialogue in "The Bald Soprano." When the Third Widow appears, she will find the cause of her misfortune.