Death and the Maiden

by Ariel Dorfman

Overview

“Suspenseful, riveting . . . Achieves a universality that is movingly personal.” —The New York Times

The explosively provocative, award-winning drama set in a country that has just emerged from a totalitarian dictatorship

Gerardo Escobar has just been chosen to head the commission that will investigate the crimes of the old regime when his car breaks down and he is picked up by the humane doctor Roberto Miranda. But in the voice of this good Samaritan, Gerardo's wife, Paulina Salas, thinks she recognizes another man—the one who raped and tortured her as she lay blindfolded in a military detention center years before.

Relentlessly paced and filled with lethal surprises, Death and the Maiden is an inquest into the darker side of humanity—one in which everyone is implicated and justice itself comes to seem like a fragile, perhaps ambiguous invention.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140246841
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/01/1994
Series:	Penguin Plays
Edition description:	Tie-in
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	440,120
Product dimensions:	4.98(w) x 7.62(h) x 0.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ariel Dorfman, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright, is a Chilean expatriate who lives with his family in Durham, North Carolina, where he now holds the Walter Hines Page chair at Duke University.

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the Olivier Award for Best Play

“Like Sophocles . . . a terrifying moral thriller which combines brilliant theatricality with clear thought and fierce compassion.”
—Sunday Times (London)

From the Publisher

This powerful political drama and psychological thriller by the noted Chilean writer premiered in London last summer, where it won the Time Out Award for Best Play. In March it opened in the United States on Broadway, with direction by Mike Nichols and starring Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss, and Gene Hackman. The play focuses on a woman who finds herself in the position to exact revenge upon a man whom she believes to have been her torturer 15 years earlier. In telling this story, the author also addresses the dilemmas which touch all our lives: innocence and evil, truth and lies, forgiveness, and revenge. This is a worthwhile addition to modern drama collections.-- Howard E. Miller, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Missouri Lib., St. Louis

Library Journal

Dorfman’s play gives us a woman who recognizes, in a chance acquaintance of her husband, a man who tortured her during a fascist period in her country’s past, and she takes the opportunity to seek justice. The acting is basically strong, though John Kapelos’s performance is a bit stagy. But the play itself doesn’t transition well to audio. Crucial actions take place without speech, and we don’t know, at once, who has done what to whom, as a viewing audience would. The ending, which is ambiguous in any case, is here enigmatically so. The play has some powerful moments and much to say about issues of power, revenge, and justice, but the simple inability to see it leaves this program unsatisfying. W.M. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2010 - AudioFile