We study the fundamental groups of the complements to curves on simply connected surfaces, admitting non-abelian free groups as their quotients. We show that given a subset of the Néron–Severi group of such a surface, there are only finitely many classes of equisingular isotopy of curves with irreducible components belonging to this subset for which the fundamental groups of the complement admit surjections onto a free group of a given sufficiently large rank. Examples of subsets of the Néron–Severi group are given with infinitely many isotopy classes of curves with irreducible components from such a subset and fundamental groups of the complements admitting surjections on a free group only of a small rank.

The paper studies a relation between fundamental group of the complement to a plane singular curve and the orbifold pencils containing it. The main tool is the use of Albanese varieties of cyclic covers ramified along such curves. Our results give sufficient conditions for a plane singular curve to belong to an orbifold pencil, that is, a pencil of plane curves with multiple fibers inducing a map onto an orbifold curve whose orbifold fundamental group is nontrivial. We construct an example of a cyclic cover of the projective plane which is an abelian surface isomorphic to the Jacobian of a curve of genus 2 illustrating the extent to which these conditions are necessary.

Let $\mathcal{A}$ be a line arrangement in the complex projective plane ${{\mathbb{P}}^{2}}$, having the points of multiplicity $\ge \,3$ situated on two lines in $\mathcal{A}$, say ${{H}_{0}}$ and ${{H}_{\infty }}$. Then we show that the non-local irreducible components of the first resonance variety ${{\mathcal{R}}_{1}}(\mathcal{A})$ are 2-dimensional and correspond to parallelograms $P$ in ${{\mathbb{C}}^{2}}={{\mathbb{P}}^{2}}\text{ }\backslash \text{ }{{H}_{\infty }}$ whose sides are in $\mathcal{A}$ and for which ${{H}_{0}}$ is a diagonal.