Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” which opened last week at the Brooks Atkinson in a production directed by Mike Nichols, is not the subtlest of plays. Set in the present, in “a country that is probably Chile,” it concerns a woman’s attempt to visit private justice on the man she holds responsible for torturing her in captivity fifteen years before. The woman (Glenn Close) may or may not be deluded in thinking that the man she hears dropping off her husband at their beach house at the beginning of the play and the doctor who used to listen to Schubert while experimenting on her with electric-shock therapy are one and the same. The man (Gene Hackman) may or may not have ulterior motives for returning several hours later and wangling an invitation to stay the night. The husband (Richard Dreyfuss), a human-rights lawyer who, ironically, has just been appointed to a commission investigating past atrocities, may or may not be merely humoring her in allowing her to put the man on trial. Certainly he is stunned the next morning to find his wife holding a gun on the poor fellow, after binding him to a chair and stuffing her dirty panties in his mouth.
What crimes, if any, justify punishment exacted according to private justice? Isn’t it odd how violence brutalizes not only its victims but its authors? And where will it all end? The questions raised by “Death and the Maiden” have been oft before but ne’er so ploddingly explored. Not only does Mr. Dorfman take three long scenes to set up what he wants us to view as the central issue of his play—that Miss Close is doing to Mr. Hackman exactly what she accuses him and his ilk of having done to her—but he has Mr. Dreyfuss spell it out several times, long after we’ve made the connections ourselves, and long after we’ve ceased to care. Weeks later, it seems, Mr. Dreyfuss is still dwelling on the irony of the situation; and, in fact, Mr. Dorfman’s play never gets much beyond this idea. To be sure, the play observes classical rules about unity of time and place, and about offstage violence (Glenn Close goes into the guest bedroom to conk Gene Hackman on the head), but the sententious way in which Mr. Dorfman approaches his Aschylean theme seems exploitative in view of how little he has to say about it.
I haven’t seen the production of “Death and the Maiden” that took London by storm last year, but I gather from people who have that what made it so effective was the performance of Juliet Stevenson in the central role. Knowing how she can seem to teeter ambiguously between madness and sanity, or between moral ascendancy and moral naïveté, I can imagine the tension Miss Stevenson would bring to a play even as flaccid as Mr. Dorfman’s. With the brittle Miss Close in the role, there are no ambiguities, and her co-stars are grossly miscast. As so often with Mr. Nichols, it’s a question of wrongheadedness when it comes to matters of style and context. He made a mockery of Beckett’s anonymous tramps with his all-star “Waiting for Godot” and, before that, turned Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” into a substandard drawing-room comedy. This time, by calling on quintessentially American stars like Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss to stand for extremes of Latin-American political repression, he renders meaningless what would have been merely obvious instead.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, March 30, 1992