Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman

First published: 1992

First produced: 1990, at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London

Type of plot: Mystery and detective

Time of work: 1990

Locale: Chile

Principal Characters:

• Paulina Salas, a torture victim, about forty years old
• Gerardo Escobar, her husband, a lawyer, about forty-five years old
• Roberto Miranda, a medical doctor, about fifty years old

The Play

On April 6, 1975, Paulina Salas, then a university student, was abducted by agents of her country’s right-wing government. For more than two months, she became one of Latin America’s many “disappeared”; she was interrogated, tortured, and raped in order to elicit from her the name of a leader of the leftist opposition: Gerardo Escobar, then her lover, later her husband. The play takes place fifteen years later, just hours after Gerardo has been appointed head of the new, democratically elected government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission is charged with investigating those human rights abuses by the previous government that resulted in the death, or the presumption of death, of the victim. After waiting fifteen years for justice, and after years spent nursing the physical and psychological wounds that have left her pathologically apprehensive and unable to enjoy sex or bear children, Paulina views Gerardo’s appointment as a vindication of the pain she endured but also a mockery of her suffering: The commission’s mandate demands that victims’ pain remain private and the wrongs they suffered unheard and unredressed.

The fear with which Paulina responds to the sound of an unfamiliar car pulling up to the couple’s isolated beach house at the beginning of the play establishes the fragile nature of both her emotional state and the newly elected government. The fragility of her marriage is established as Gerardo blames her for the indignity, vulnerability, and loneliness of being stranded on the way home after his meeting with the president. He holds Paulina responsible not because of his punctured tire but because she had failed to have the spare repaired and had loaned their jack to her mother. Fortunately, a good Samaritan, the medical doctor Roberto Miranda, stopped and drove him home. The marital tension increases as Paulina in turn accuses him of lying to her, pretending to “need” her approval, her “yes,” before accepting the commission appointment that he has already accepted.

Late that night, Gerardo and Paulina are awakened by a knock at their door—just the kind of knock they feared during the earlier regime’s reign of terror, and continue to fear. However, the visitor is Miranda, who, having heard on the radio of Gerardo’s appointment, has come to return Gerardo’s flat tire and, in this “small way,” facilitate Gerardo’s important work. The two men talk rather freely about that work and engage in a bit of sexist banter before Gerardo invites Roberto to stay the night. However, the sound of Roberto’s voice, a particular line of Nietzsche he quotes, the tape of Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet she finds in his car, and later, the smell of his body convince a distraught Paulina that he is the man who presided over her torture fifteen years before. She knocks the sleeping doctor unconscious, ties him up, and puts him on trial. Appalled by what his “unrecognizable,” pistol-wielding wife has done yet powerless either to stop her or to convince her of the harm she is doing to herself and their cause (as well as his career), Gerardo reluctantly accepts the role she assigns him, defending Miranda.

Because Paulina will free the doctor only if he confesses to having committed wrongs of which he claims his innocence and ignorance, Gerardo believes it necessary to betray Paulina in order to save her, his innocent guest, his newly elected government, and his own ideals and career. He plays the part of good cop in order to elicit from her the story that will become Roberto’s confession. In one of the play’s most startling moments, with the stage darkened, Paulina’s harrowing narrative of abuse segues into Miranda’s contrite narrative of abuse inflicted. As the lights come up, it becomes clear that the words the audience hears are part of Miranda’s tape-recorded confession, which he is now writing down.

Although the confession ostensibly satisfies the terms established for Miranda’s release, Paulina now claims that having anticipated Gerardo’s ploy, she incorporated mistakes into her account, which Miranda unwittingly corrected and thus proved both his guilt and her right to punish him. It is unclear whether Paulina really did outwit Gerardo or whether she merely pretends to have outwitted him, but her actions point to how desperate and unstable she is. Other events are left open for interpretation, including whether Paulina does finally shoot Miranda and if she does, whether doing so brings her any relief. With Gerardo sent to fetch the doctor’s car, Paulina and Miranda confront each other, he proclaiming his innocence and refusing to yield further (least of all to a woman), and she threatening to kill him while asking why it is that people such as herself always have to compromise and asking “What do we lose by killing one of them?”

The play’s final scene deepens the ambiguity. Set “some months later,” after the commission has made its final report, it shows Paulina able for the first time in fifteen years to listen to the music she had come to associate with her torture, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Paulina is silent throughout the entire scene, including the intermission when Gerardo, once again in command and his star still rising, talks continuously and confidently, even as Roberto—or his ghost—enters the hall and locks eyes with Paulina while the music “plays and plays and plays.”

Dramatic Devices

The effectiveness of Death and the Maiden derives from Dorfman’s combining elements from a wide range of dramatic forms to create a wholly successful and typically (if unobtrusively) postmodern form of political theater. Critical of those who have extolled Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Marquez and others as consummate metafictionists and Magical Realists while downplaying, even eliding, South American political realities, Dorfman here (and elsewhere in his writing) uses postmodern techniques to political advantage in a play in which parodic recycling underscores rather than undermines the work’s dramatic intensity and political urgency. Thus in this play (and elsewhere in his writing) Dorfman uses postmodern techniques to political advantage, parodying his contemporaries to underscore, rather than undermine, the work’s dramatic intensity and political urgency.

Death and the Maiden is at once a whodunit and a psychological thriller. It is a problem play in the Henrik Ibsen tradition but just as clearly a revenge drama in the Elizabethan mold, with a touch of the film Fatal Attraction (1987). The three-act structure creates a momentum and sense of inevitability worthy of classical tragedy but lacks any anagnorisis (recognition) or catharsis. Instead of purging the emotions and restoring order, Death and the Maiden raises questions and introduces uncertainty at every level, probing such issues as honesty in people, both with themselves and others, and effective solutions to dual psychological and political dilemmas.

Drawing on the familiar Latin American genre of the testimonial (one rooted in the region’s turbulent political realities), in which the victim of political or sexual torture tells a story that those in power wish to suppress (or have the victim repress), Death and the Maiden seems decidedly, painfully realistic, but this is realism that blends into ritual, as its documentary approach takes on a haunting, incantatory power. It is a problem play that turns into a nightmare that is at once personal and collective.

While the play’s dramatic devices contribute to the overall theme of uncertainty without allowing the audience to escape into relativism and abstraction, the spotlights that play over the audience at the end of act 3, scene 1, and the mirror that descends immediately after, in effect implicate the audience, forcing passive observers to become active participants. They are forced to imagine themselves implicated in the crimes, to place themselves in the position of those in Chilean society who continue to forge a collective amnesia of the violent political events in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Thus the audience is singled out, just as Paulina was fifteen years before, and Miranda was just a few months earlier.

Critical Context

Conceived in the early 1980’s, when the end of Pinochet’s rule was nothing more than a hope, Death and the Maiden (originally titled Scars on the Moon) was completed in three weeks, shortly after the election of Patricio Aylwin in 1990 and the appointing of the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation a few months later. It was indeed the commission that provided Dorfman with the key he needed to turn his original idea into final form. Although set in “a country that is probably Chile,” the play’s eventual worldwide success derived from early interest not in Santiago but in London: a staged reading at the Institute for Contemporary Art and inclusion in LIFT’91 (London International Festival of Theatre), before moving to the West End, where it drew rave reviews. The New York production, with its star cast, drew large crowds but largely withering reviews.

The political context so largely missing from the New York production (and the later film version) was precisely what made the play so timely and so powerful elsewhere, particularly in countries confronting their own recent histories: Argentina, the former Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, South Africa, Britain (Northern Ireland, the Falklands), and elsewhere. Although clearly a timely play given German reunification in 1990, Polish martial law, and South African apartheid, Death and the Maiden is also a play that transcends its moment in two important ways. First, it is effective, indeed riveting, theater and undoubtedly Dorfman’s most successful work, one in which his interest in postmodern techniques and his tendency to overdramatize are most successfully channeled. Second, subsequent events during the 1990’s, especially the spread of and responses to global terrorism and the debate over the failures and successes of the various Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, make Death and the Maiden seem a more urgent and arguably universal play than ever before.

Sources for Further Study

Barsky, Robert F. “Outsider Law in Literature: Construction and Representation in Death and the Maiden.” SubStance 26 (1997): 66-89.

Dorfman, Ariel. Afterword from Death and the Maiden. New York: Penguin, 1994.

Gregory, Stephen. “Ariel Dorfman and Harold Pinter: Politics of the Periphery and Theater of the Metropolis.” Comparative Drama 30 (Fall, 1996): 325-345.

Morace, Robert A. “The Life and Times of Death and the Maiden.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 42 (Summer, 2000): 135-153.

Pinet, Carolyn. “Retrieving the Disappeared Text: Women, Chaos, and Change in Argentina and Chile After the Dirty Wars.” Hispanic Journal 18 (Spring, 1997): 89-108.