After the Fall: ‘Death and the Maiden’ by Ariel Dorfman

It all happens in a lonely beach house one night somewhere in present-day Latin America.

A husband returns late, and his wife is alarmed when he steps out of a stranger’s car. She retrieves a handgun and conceals herself as he enters while thanking the driver over his shoulder, repeating invitations for a drink. The car drives away, and the wife emerges with the gun at her side. Her husband says he had a flat he couldn’t change because there was no jack in the car. A stranger drove him home, a doctor. Nothing serious he says, nothing to worry about, and where is the jack anyway?

She loaned it to her mother, she says, and they descend into a domestic squabble. Neither mentions the gun as they argue about the shared responsibilities in marriage.

Paulina: Was she pretty at least? Sexy?

Gerardo: I already said it was a man.

Paulina: You said no such thing.

Before the night is over, the doctor will knock on the door after all — having forgotten to return the flat tire for repair. The wife will put the gun to his head, tie him to a chair, and demand he confess to being the sadistic rapist who tortured her when she was a political prisoner. Her husband defends him to prevent his wife from destroying their lives.

Ariel Dorfman intended “Death and the Maiden” to be a novel and started it repeatedly over almost two decades. It wasn’t until 1991, after returning from exile to Chile when Gen. Augusto Pinochet was no longer president — but still very much a force — that Dorfman got the idea for a play instead. Three characters in a single setting confront the effects of a totalitarian dictatorship and how ordinary people will transform themselves into creatures they despise to get what they want.

Paulina is around 40 years old. A former medical student, 15 years earlier she’d been snatched off the street by security forces and repeatedly raped to extract information about Gerardo, a liberal attorney. A doctor monitored the torture sessions to keep her alive but eventually joined in. “This bitch can take a bit more. Just a teensy bit more. Give it to her.”

She was held for months, blindfolded, starved, degraded, and told them nothing. But the same routine was repeated, accompanied by the same Schubert string quartet, “Death and the Maiden,” the doctor’s favorite, he told her, played over and over as he attacked her without her ever seeing him. After being dumped on a city street in the middle of the night she made her way back to Gerardo and found him with another woman.

The marriage survived. So did the trauma.

Paulina keeps a gun close and doesn’t leave the house if she can avoid it even as Gerardo’s career blossoms in the new government, where he’s been appointed to a truth and reconciliation commission to purge the country of its brutal memories. Any offender who confesses to the commission will receive amnesty with their identities protected, for the good of the country.

It is a reflection of the real commission created in Chile to confront the atrocities of the Pinochet dictatorship.

Gerardo: The idea is that if we can throw light on the worst crimes, other abuses will also come to light.

Paulina: Only the most serious?

Gerardo: Let’s say the cases that are beyond — let’s say, repair.

Paulina: Beyond repair. Irreparable, huh?

But Paulina recognizes a familiar voice, she thinks, when the doctor walks into her home that night and accepts a drink. “Just a teensy bit more.”

Later, she plays Schubert for the doctor while he’s bound to the chair and gagged with her panties.

The playwright did not choose “Death and the Maiden” by chance. Schubert composed the quartet after surviving a severe illness only to realize he was dying. It is a foundational work of chamber music, inspired by an 18th-century poem from an earlier fable about a young girl seduced into sex by the comforting voice of death itself. Why resist when all things end? Including you.

Paulina wants her husband to put the man on trial, right there. Gerardo can’t believe she’s gone so far; it must be a breakdown, right, Doctor? The men collude to escape the situation — Gerardo from professional ruin and the doctor from death. Paulina is understandably disturbed, they tell her. They are sympathetic, they say. They urge her to be rational, to think of the consequences.

But Paulina has already thought of the consequences. They have already taken her life. Each character takes risks to protect something personal: a career, a life, a truth. And each one of them will endanger their own goals until Paulina gives the doctor, Roberto, one last chance to repent.

Roberto: No, I won’t. You’re going to kill me anyway. I’m not going to let any sick woman treat me like this. But you’re killing an innocent man. ... Oh, Paulina. Isn’t it time we stopped?

Paulina: And why does it always have to be people like me who have to sacrifice, why are we always the ones who have to make concessions, why always me who has to bite her tongue? What do we lose by killing one of them? What do we lose? What do we lose?

A playwright direction at the end calls for an enormous mirror to be lowered in front of the stage. The characters move into the audience and finish the play while addressing the mirror. The audience is forced to watch the outcome in a space they now share, examining their own place in it.

Gerardo: Do you understand what you’re doing to me?

Paulina: Beyond repair, huh? Irreparable.