The standard narrative about María Irene Fornés goes something like this: Despite the Cuban American playwright’s astonishing output, at more than 40 plays; despite her seemingly bottomless well of imagination and invention; despite her formal daring and whetted language and nine Obie Awards, she remains too little known.

That’s true even among lovers of 20th century theater’s other great experimenters. Where Edward Albee and Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter are required reading, Fornés, who wrote her last play in 2000 and died in 2018, somehow doesn’t quite make the college syllabus.

Hands wring. Explanations shuffle in, lamenting a melange of prejudices — racism, sexism, LGBT bigotry, xenophobia, elitism. Maybe her work was too weird, too difficult, too ahead of its time. Maybe it was insufficiently interested in stroking the straight white male ego, which was then, and is still now, the ultimate gatekeeper. Maybe widespread recognition is a false idol anyway, especially for someone who lived and wrote by her own rules, including by being the lover of Susan Sontag.

And so fans make the underdog case, over and over. But as American Conservatory Theater mounts Fornés’ “Fefu and Her Friends” March 24-May 1 at the Strand Theater, that story doesn’t feel right. To encounter Fornés’ work and to explore her life and mind is not an underdog’s experience; it is a thrilling one that marshals the brain, heart and guts, all fully, all equally.

The phrase that kept coming to mind for me with “Fefu,” which was written in 1977, was “deliciously forbidden.” In the show, which is directed by Pam MacKinnon with a triple-flame-emoji cast of eight local women, it’s 1935, and Fefu (Catherine Castellanos) is gathering her friends to prepare a presentation for an education fundraiser. The audience starts and ends as one big group in a traditional playhouse setting, but in between, we’re divided into four groups to travel to separate rooms to see four short scenes (which the actors perform four times in a row, once for each group). The conceit enlists all corners of the Strand; call it walk-through immersive theater, but conceived decades before those terms became buzzwords.

What feels deliciously forbidden to me is less the plot (though plenty of extraordinary things happen — firing bullets alongside washing dishes) than the words that spill out of characters’ mouths, starting with Fefu’s first line: “My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.” Its wording is as fine and precise as etched glass, yet its meanings expand outward and circle back on themselves. It’s a paradox, a provocation, a riddle, a confession all in one. And yet none of those things, for Fefu frequently suggests a total want of malice or even guile. There’s a purity and simplicity about her, a rigorous, uncompromising honesty.

I wish that I had the courage, clarity and honesty to say some of the things Fornés’ characters say — especially with my fellow women — about body parts and desire and how to be in the world and death. “I felt small in your presence,” says Paula (Stacy Ross) to Cecilia (Marga Gomez). “People act as if they don’t have genitals,” says Emma (Cindy Goldfield). “Her mind is adventurous,” Christina (Sarita Ocón) says of Fefu. “But in adventure there is taking chances and risks.”

“This play doesn’t give us permission,” Castellanos said in a group interview during the first week of rehearsal. “It beckons, it insists that we explore the true power of the female.”

Early in the play, Fefu notes how tricky female friendship is. “Women are restless with each other,” she says. “They are like live wires.” When men come and insulate us from each other, “The danger is gone, but the price is the mind and the spirit.”

In my own life, I have observed with regret that my closest friendships are with men. I think I shy away from other women. Fefu’s line seemed to echo my experience, but then actor Leontyne Mbele-Mbong, who plays Sue, pointed out, “She brings up that description of friendship between women and how fraught it is but basically spends the entire play disproving it.”

The characters, she added, “have a level of intellectual curiosity that allows them to eschew all of these conventional ways of being around each other. They’re not going to fall into the trap of being offended by things, or being vulnerable or embarrassed or tactful. No! They’re going to get over that in pursuit of something far more interesting than the pettiness of social niceties.”

Moment by moment, they’re investigating what one another are thinking and feeling and why, no matter how painful or embarrassing. For Ross, that’s a double-edged sword. “You have so much in common that can make the friendship so much closer so much quicker — and therefore so much more at risk if something goes wrong.”

“I feel like Irene wants us to dance within that invitation,” said Ocón, using the name Fornés went by. Ocón reported a visceral reaction against my use of the term “forbidden”; she saw joy in the play’s embrace of risk. Instantly I envied her; I hoped that by revisiting the play in performance I’d get closer to where she is.

“When you start table work,” Castellanos added, “with some plays, you write down, ‘OK, what is happening in this scene? Where am I?’ My first page of my notebook here is like, ‘What is possible?’ She” — Fornés — “inspired me to ask that question. Then, the sky’s the limit, and so is Hades.”

“Fefu and Her Friends”:Written by María Irene Fornés. Directed by Pam MacKinnon. Thursday, March 24-May 1. $25-$110, subject to change. ACT’s Strand Theater, 1127 Market St., S.F. 415-849-2228.www.act-sf.org