LOS SOLES TRUNCOS

Los Soles Truncos is a Spanish-language drama by the Puerto Rican playwright René Marqués, staged Off-Broadway by Repertorio Español in a new production directed by José Zayas. The text is spoken in Spanish and accompanied by English subtitles, and the running time is 70 minutes with no intermission. English renderings of the title vary, from The Half-Suns to The Maimed Suns, The Shattered Suns and Truncated Suns, so try more than one when searching.

The play follows three elderly sisters who have shut themselves inside a decaying house in Old San Juan after losing their money and their place in society. In Marqués's design, the house stands for the island's old colonial upper class and for what became of it when Puerto Rico passed from Spanish to American hands in 1898.

Repertorio Español billed this staging as the play's New York City premiere. As of October 2026, the production has no announced closing date, and it plays in rotating repertory next to the company's other titles. The company dates to 1968, when Gilberto Zaldívar and René Buch launched it as a New York home for plays from Latin America, Spain and the Hispanic communities of the Americas.

The Burkhart sisters were born into Puerto Rico's upper class. Their parents, standing, belongings and money are gone, and the family hacienda in Toa Alta was confiscated for unpaid taxes. What remains is an old two-story house on Calle del Cristo, nearly in ruins, where the sisters live behind closed doors. Inés, 70, is the eldest and the practical one who runs the household. Hortensia, 68, was the family beauty. Emilia, 65, is fragile and dreamy, writes poetry and limps from a childhood injury.

The play begins after Hortensia has died. Inés and Emilia keep a candle burning in the next room and prepare their sister for burial, while debts push the house toward auction. The new owners want to make it a luxury inn whose guests would be tourists, bankers and naval officers. The sisters are determined to keep their home and their dignity, and the passing years work both for them and against them.

Hortensia returns in memory and dream scenes, as a young woman engaged to a lieutenant in the service of the Spanish governor general. Those scenes explain why she later swore never to marry and ordered the balcony doors shut for good, and they show how much each sister felt about the same man. Around them, the sisters relive the Spanish colonial years and the American invasion of 1898. Their mother, the play recalls, sickened and died around the turn of the century after the American bombardment of San Juan.

René Marqués (1919–1979) was a short-story writer and playwright born and raised in Arecibo. He belonged to Puerto Rico's literary Generation of the 1950s and supported Puerto Rican independence. He wrote Los Soles Truncos in 1958, drawing it from one of his own stories, Purificación en la calle del Cristo. The play was published in 1959 in his collection Teatro. His other best-known drama is La Carreta (The Oxcart), the story of a rural family's move to San Juan and later New York.

The script deals with love and jealousy, with time and its effects (change, powerlessness, aging) and with the American invasion. The title comes from the house itself. Its three closed double windows are each topped by a half-circle of red, blue and yellow glass, which the stage directions compare to the rays of maimed suns. The English subtitles are by Sara Buitrago, from a translation by Mariana Carreño King.

The staging is minimalist. Escalante's modern set puts a chair on stage and places a scale model of the Cristo Street house above the playing area, and Cordero's projections are part of the design. The actresses' voices are amplified. The soundscape includes Puerto Rican bomba and plena percussion by guest musician Nelson Matthew González, along with classical piano by Penny Prince.

As of October 2026, the three sisters are played by Zulema Clares (Inés), Wanda Arriaga (Emilia) and Mónica Steuer (Hortensia). Clares is from Cuba, Steuer from Brazil, and Arriaga is Puerto Rican.

Marqués's play was first staged in 1958, at the first festival of Puerto Rican theater run by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, with Victoria Espinosa directing. The staging was a success, and Espinosa remained its only director for the next thirty years. In 1959 the institute sponsored a bilingual presentation at the Goodman Memorial Theatre in Chicago within the Festival de las Américas.

The Repertorio Español production began previews on February 20, 2025, and opened on February 21, 2025. Its first block of performances ran through May 10, 2025, and on May 2, 2025, the company announced added performances through the rest of 2025 and into spring 2026. The production returned in the 2025–2026 season, and it also gave two guest performances at the Hostos arts center in the Bronx, on March 18 and 19, 2026.