Playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo, widely considered the father of modern Spanish theatre, died April 29 of a stroke, Reuters reported.

Mr. Vallejo's best-known works were The Sleep of Reason, History of a Stairway and In the Burning Darkness, a thinly veiled critique of the fascist reign of Francisco Franco. His The Sleep of Reason (1970) and The Music Window (1989) are published in English language translations by Marion Peter Holt.

The Sleep of Reason is a 1970 drama in two acts. It is Buero Vallejo's most widely performed play, about the painter Goya at a point in life when he is deaf and covering the walls of his country house with the dark and phantasmagoric "Black Paintings." The paintings are seen as projections throughout the play. The action takes place over a few days in December 1823 and culminates in violence performed in silence.

The Sleep of Reason has been translated into more than 15 languages. The English professional premiere came in 1984, at Center Stage in Baltimore. The Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia, The Loose Change Col. in London and the Bailiwick Repertory Co. in Chicago also performed the play in English.

Franco's dictatorship arrested the leftist playwright and sentenced him to death, but the sentence was commuted and he was freed in 1946. Mr. Vallejo won the country's most prestigious literary award, the Cervantes Prize, in 1986.

The translator's agent is the Barbara Hogenson Agency in Manhattan.

-- By Kenneth Jones