Death and the Maiden
By Arial Dorfman
Directed by Mary Fawcett Watko
With Vinny Ferrelli, Frank B. Moorman, CeCe Newbrough
November 2-5, 2006

Set in Chile following the fall of a Chilean dictatorship, a woman's husband brings home a man show car has broken down. Upon hearing the stranger's voice, she realizes the stranger might be the man who raped and terrorized her 14 years earlier. In spite of her husband's objections, she decides to take th eman prisoner, threatening him with a gun and determined to get a taped confession from him at any cost.

Director's Notes

Directing shows with significant meaning, strong humanitarian messages and deep thought provoking issues are always gratifying and of course educational. Death and the Maiden indulges in a multitude of emotions that will touch the human soul. The emphasis is not so much the story of a country that has gone from a democracy to dictatorship and back to democracy – but more about how it affected the lives of the three people you are about to encounter. This story addresses complicated issues that many people have had to face. How do you learn to live alongside the same people that once were your enemies? After having been tortured and abused, how do you learn to move forward with your life? How do you forgive…?

Chilean Author Ariel Dorfman narrowly escaped death on September 11, 1973, when a last-minute change kept him from his work at the Presidential Palace in Santiago, where he was a cultural adviser to Chilean President Salvador Allende. Allende died that day when Chilean troops stormed the palace, and Dorfman was forced into exile. On the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks in the United States, he wrote an essay, “Lessons of a Catastrophe,” from which this is excerpted:

“It can’t happen here. Thirty years ago that is what we chanted, that is what we sang, on the streets of Santiago de Chile. There can never be a dictatorship in this country, we proclaimed to the winds of history that were about to furiously descend on us; our democracy is too solid, our armed forces too committed to popular sovereignty, our people too much in love with freedom. But it did happen and the bombing by the air force of the Presidential Palace started a dictatorship that was to last seventeen years and that, today, even after we have recovered democracy, continues to haunt and corrode my country. In the coming years, could something similar befall those nations with apparently stable democracies? Could the erosion of freedom that so many in Chile accepted as necessary find a perverse recurrence in the United States or India or Brazil, in France or Spain or Britain?

What has transpired thus far, in the two years since the disastrous attack on New York and Washington, is far from encouraging. We also thought, we also shouted, we also assured the planet: it cannot happen here. We also thought, on those not-so-remote streets of Santiago, that we could shut our eyes to the terrors that were awaiting us tomorrow.”