I had forgotten much of Junot Diaz's 2007 novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" from when I read it a few years ago. So, when I heard that Chicago's Goodman Theatre planned a stage adaptation of Diaz's book, I re-read the story. I was surprised at how much I had forgotten from this complex tale of generations of Dominican-Americans surviving a brutal dictatorship and immigration to New Jersey.

The book and play tell the titular Oscar's coming-of-age story. He is obese, awkward, unpopular, and obsessed with nerd culture, including science fiction, fantasy, comic books, anime, and video games.

In the play, as in the book, Oscar believes that his family is afflicted with the fuku curse, for which he blames everything from his mother's cancer to his failures with women.

Marco Antonio Rodriguez's theatrical adaptation simplifies the written story by removing many of the subplots. Gone are the tales of Oscar's childhood, the flashback to the origins of the family curse, the aside told by Oscar's sister, Lola, and most of the brutality of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who terrorized the Dominican Republic for decades. The latter is mentioned only briefly in a flashback that explains why Oscar and Lola's mother, Beli, hates her country of origin. The story covers Oscar's college years, beginning at Rutgers and including time off to visit his Dominican homeland and confront the family curse.

Director Wendy Mateo chose a minimalist set, designed by Regina Garcia, to imply each location without recreating it. Set hands dressed in the same costume as Oscar placed and removed tables and beds to indicate a change of location. The video projected behind the stage served more to set the mood than to enhance the scenery. Flames engulfed the wall whenever the characters acknowledged or confronted Fuku directly.

An all-Latinx cast complemented one another well. Lenin D'Anthony Izquierdo was less pathetic and more optimistic than his literary counterpart; Julissa Calderon projected righteous anger as Lola, and Kelvin Grullon displayed impressive subtlety as Oscar's roommate, Yunior. Two actors who played minor characters stood out to me: Jalbelly Guzmán, who played the two women with whom Oscar fell in love, and Arik Vega, who played all the show's villains. Both actors gave their all to present over-the-top characters.

The Goodman Theatre is the first to present this play in English. It ran in Spanish in other cities as "La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao." The script retains many of the lapses into Spanish that Diaz included in his novel. My remedial Spanish was insufficient to catch every joke that made others laugh. But I was never at a loss to know what was happening. Some may think the nearly three-hour running time is excessive. It is not. The story and characters held me throughout.