[In the following review, Stavans lauds the powerful ambiguity of Dorfman's narrative in Death and the Maiden, arguing that the play is “full of action and disarming ideas.”]

The Chilean novelist and critic Ariel Dorfman's 1990 play Death and the Maiden (the title comes from a Schubert quartet) has the taste of a tautly constructed classic. Although its cast is minimal (three characters), it is full of action and disarming ideas. Divided into three acts and set in Chile or in “any country that has given itself a democratic government” just after a long period of repression, it is built around an unresolved mystery. Paulina Salas, the forty-year-old wife of a wealthy lawyer who is asked to serve on a commission investigating crimes committed by the military junta, was raped and tortured during her youth by a doctor who worked for the dictator. One night several decades later her husband, Gerardo Escobar, gives a lift to a stranger, Roberto Miranda, whose car has broken down in the middle of the road. Unable to activate his car and thus forced to spend the night at Escobar's, Miranda is introduced to Paulina. Believing she recognizes in him a voice from her past and the identity of her torturer, she kidnaps the alleged victimizer while her husband is asleep and, after a few hours of doubt and fear, decides to take the law into her own hands: to put him on trial right at her home.

The first act sets forth Paulina's dilemma; in the second we witness the trial; the third has an ambiguous ending. Dorfman deliberately leaves a number of questions unanswered. Is Miranda the real torturer? Has Paulina lost her mind? Should crimes under a military regime be forgotten, to give way to a more peaceful environment where democracy prevails? How do we forgive those who have hurt us irreparably? For this and more, Death and the Maiden can be staged in basically two ways: as a tragedy or as a thriller. (In 1992 I saw the New York version at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, with Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss, and Gene Hackman. The director, Mike Nichols, injected too much humor into the text and emptied the plot of political connotations. The result, of course, might have pleased the Broadway crowd but angered many and infuriated Dorfman, who made his dissatisfaction public.)

The play, the author's third (Widows and Reader are the other two) and certainly his most successful, is dedicated to the British writer Harold Pinter, who attended its first reading in November 1990 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London and was instrumental in arranging its premiere at the Royal Court Upstairs. (In England the role of Paulina was played by Juliet Stevenson.) Apparently, Death and the Maiden was written in English (no translator is credited), which confirms that, like Carlos Fuentes and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Dorfman belongs to the polyglot branch of Latin American literati who move comfortably from one language to another (mainly from Spanish to English but also to French and German, as in the cases of Severo Sarduy and Antonio Skármeta), depending on the audience. Published in paperback by Penguin, the play also offers an afterword that describes how the plot came to be, first as a novelistic idea and then as a theater piece. A highly recommended delight that grasps the pulse of our century.