Death and the Maiden at Spring Street Studios

"It happened yesterday but it could well be today. A woman awaits the return of her husband as the sun goes down. The dictatorship that plagued her land has just fallen, and everything is uncertain. The woman is full of fear, gripped by a secret terror that she only shares with the man she loves. During the night and the day that follows she will have to confront that fear, she will bring to justice in her living room the doctor she believes is responsible for having tortured and raped her years ago. Her husband, a lawyer in charge of a commission investigating the deaths of thousands of dissidents under the previous regime, must defend the accused man because without the rule of law the transition to democracy will be compromised; if his wife kills that doctor, the husband will not be able to help heal a sick and wounded land.

Twenty years ago, when Death and the Maiden opened, the country where that woman, Paulina, awaited a constantly delayed justice, was Chile or Argentina or South Africa or Hungary or China. So many societies that back then were being torn by the question of what you do with the trauma of the past, how to live side by side with your enemies, how to judge those who had abused power without destroying the fabric of reconciliation necessary to move forward. Death and the Maiden is said to be based on events in Chile, but it could take place in any of the many countries where rule is by force and intimidation. It is, to some degree, about actual guilt: Is this the man who raped and tortured her? To another degree, it is about the nature of guilt and human identity: If this is the same man, has he perhaps changed? Was he a product of the times - even a victim of the times, which forced some to be torturers no less than requiring others to be victims? If he is guilty, does he repent? Is there forgiveness for his crime? Does the woman, by making him a captive and taunting him, descend to his level? Is her husband in some way caught up in a male bonding with this man against women - an instinctive camaraderie that requires him to join forces with any man against any woman? All of these questions lurk tantalizingly under the surface of Death and the Maiden, making it richer than its materials might promise. The story is not about whether this is the same man who tortured her, but about the question: What then? There is even the subtle suggestion that - if he was the man - he was not as cruel to her as he might have been, might even have shown her some twisted kindness, during those dark days when an evil society forced captors and their prisoners to enact the rites of torture.

Today, as the same plays revived, its main drama is echoed in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Iraq, Thailand, Zimbabwe and now Libya. In fact, because torture became widespread after the criminal attacks on New York on 9/11, because the most powerful nations in the world, and particularly the US, justified or were complicit in egregious abuses of human rights in order to make themselves feel safe, because they unleashed terror to fight and avenge terror, it could be ventured that the core dilemmas of Death and the Maiden are more relevant today than they ever were.