I HAVE BEEN HAVING conversations about Death and the Maiden with Scott Palmer for at least five years — its almost poetic use of language, “modern classic” status, juicy dramatic roles, female protagonist, and provocative subject matter make it an obvious candidate for inclusion in any Bag&Baggage season. And while, back in the fall of 2016 when we were programming for 2017–18, we could hardly have foreseen the striking timeliness of producing a play about a woman confronting her sexual abuser, this is the season Ariel Dorfman’s stunning play finally made it into the lineup. “Oh,” Scott said to me, as we finished up a play-selection meeting two Septembers ago, “and you get to direct it.”
Cue a wave of thrill and terror running through my entire body — a wave that has recurred many times in the intervening 18 months. This play is not for the faint of heart, and not only was Scott entrusting me with its care for our company, he was entrusting me with my very own directing project for the first time in my seven year history with Bag&Baggage.
Jump ahead to this winter, and I am sitting at my computer staring at a Word document that is supposed to contain my director’s notes. Instead, the page is full of sentence fragments — generally involving the words “truth”, “justice”, “questions”, “violence”, and “women” — as well as a smattering of quotations of smart things Ariel Dorfman has said.
This play is dense. And challenging. And complicated… It’s hard to know how to talk about it.
But perhaps that’s exactly the point.
Ariel Dorfman wrote Death and the Maiden in 1990, on the heels of 17 years spent as a political exile from Chile. Returning to his country, he was flooded with a wealth of challenges and complications that were almost impossible to know how to talk about. But to Dorfman, this was precisely why it was important to begin the conversation.
“How can those who tortured and those who were tortured coexist in the same land,” he writes in the afterword to the 1991 publishing of Death and the Maiden. “How to heal a country that has been traumatized by repression if the fear to speak out is still omnipresent everywhere? And how do you reach the truth if lying has become a habit?”
These questions gnawed at the Chilean conscience and at Dorfman’s own, prompting him to hurl theatergoers into a 90-minute vortex of violation, vengeance, atonement, truth-seeking, personal pain, political rhetoric, and shifting sympathies, ultimately leaving the verdict in the audience’s hands. Part of what makes this play so exemplary is the way it aims to heal without providing any actual answers. What Dorfman acknowledges — which we as Americans in 2018 could certainly take a nod from — is the reality that being challenged to actually engage the tough questions, to have those difficult conversations, to grapple with complicated issues of humanity, goes a whole lot further in making a real difference among contentious groups of people than passively providing tidy solutions.
In the notes he includes at the beginning of the script, Dorfman tells us that “the time is the present and the place, a country that is probably Chile but could be any country that has given itself a democratic government just after a long period of dictatorship” — instantly indicating to us that the immediacy of this play is just as important as its history. The questions Dorfman asks of himself and his audiences are not simply appropriate for 90s-era Chileans; rather, they speak straight to the essence of our humanity, challenging us to consider the nature of truth, justice, power, and forgiveness. How do we make sense of the #metoo movement and the Silence Breakers? Do we “believe all women”? What about Black Lives Matter? How should we handle the global refugee crisis, or the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Rohingya, Ukraine, Yemen, or the Islamic State?
Ariel Dorfman would invite you to watch this play and live in those questions. And so do I. And while it’s painfully true that contentious social movements and politically-charged initiatives and human rights abuses are hard to talk about, I think it’s important that we start the conversation.
As you watch the action on stage today, you are joining a conversation that we began back in the fall of 2016 when we decided to produce Death and the Maiden. You are joining a conversation that has united a new group of artists in a new theatre venue — the acting talents of Mandy Khoshnevisan, Tony Green, and Nathan Dunkin, and the design genius of Tyler Buswell and Jeffery Smith grace The Vault for the very first time in this show. And you are joining a conversation that I have been waiting — with thrill and terror and great anticipation — to have with you, our incredible Bag&Baggage audience.
Welcome.
Cassie Greer, Assoc. Artistic Director
Bag&Baggage’s Death and the Maiden ticket and schedule information here.
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