Generations of playwrights and theater students have been inspired by Cuban American playwright María Irene Fornés and many of them have read her 1977 drama "Fefu and Her Friends" — but few of them have seen it, since it's rarely revived.

That's because it's a tricky production. It introduced the concept of "promenade theater" to the world, where audiences walk from scene to scene. But the Off Broadway Theatre for a New Audience took it on, and it's there in a beautifully-designed production through next weekend.

It tells the story of Fefu, a 1935 New England socialite and an incredibly compelling character — a kind of straight-talking, female Cary Grant. She says what she thinks, flirts with all her female friends, is unexpectedly funny and hides emotional pain within a patina of social polish. The audience starts off in her living room while the seven of them gather, and then as they break up into different groups around the house, the audience breaks into groups, too, and follows them, rotating through four scenes.

What Fornés does so wonderfully is capture how women behave during their downtime, when they're not performing for anyone and they're with people who let them be themselves. So many plays turn groups of women into cat-fight extravaganzas. Here, instead, is a squealing water fight while doing dishes. It's not sexual, it's not mean, it's just fun.  These are women who are friends, who are playful — who can sit near each other without saying much, or who can say everything they're thinking because they know someone who will understand. 

But Fornés was an avant-garde playwright who wasn't interested in a narrative, and what might have been provocative in a SoHo Loft in the 1970s is just frustrating in an Off Broadway theater. The small, one- and two-person scenes are wonderful, but when the group (and the audience) reconvenes, the show seems like it's going somewhere....and then it just doesn't. 

Instead, it feels like a wonderful house party where the audience gets to eavesdrop, make inferences, guess at relationships and outcomes. I can't imagine a stronger production of this important work. 

Fefu And Her Friends by María Irene Fornés and directed by aLileana Blain-Cruz, at Theater For a New Audience's Polonsky Shakespeare Center, through Dec. 12.