"Ariel Dorfman is probably best known for Death and the Maiden, the play he wrote in Chile during that country's transition to democracy in the summer of 1990. Since its first production in Chile, the story of Paulina Salas, a woman who kidnaps the man she suspects tortured her more than 20 years ago, has been staged in more than thirty countries. In Germany alone, in 1993 there were more than 50 different productions all running at the same time. Taught in colleges and high schools, still performed around the globe, Death and the Maiden is a classic example of the coming together of art and the struggle for human rights." The play won the Laurence Olivier award for Best New Play of 1992.
From the Duke University website where Ariel Dorfman is a distinguished professor: http://www.adorfman.duke.edu/
Death and the Maiden - Afterword to the Original Stage Play
4 comments:
In his afterword, Ariel Dorfman presents his process of creating his play and his difficulty in putting his themes that he wishes to convey into words. His characters appear not to have been created by him consciously, but to have come into existence by themselves in their own time. This is very similar to the way Harold Pinter, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, describes the will-power of his characters and his reluctance to force out any changes which occur throughout his plays.
This gives the feeling that these writers are in fact at the mercy of their characters instead of the other way around and perhaps shows the audience why the characters of Death and the Maiden seem so realistic. They were treated as conscious human beings and so emerged as such, with complex personalities and unexpected reactions to the events around them. This reality emphasized the issues of human rights and caused them to appear starker and more painful because it is much more difficult for the audience to ignore actual human beings than it is to ignore two dimensional created characters.
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
This quote by C.S. Lewis is a perfect answer to the question “Why did Ariel Dorfman write Death and the Maiden?” I agree with Julia’s comment that Ariel Dorfman’s characters have come into existence by themselves at the time rather than intentionally crafted by Ariel Dorfman, and this it reinforces the validity of the quote, “literature adds to reality” in a sense that literature aids to convey the truth which could be extremely difficult to put into any other art form other than a fictional play, especially at the time that Death and the Maiden was written.
Very insightful Julia, I think this idea that the characters if let to speak for themselves become more real is a really interesting point. This also may be why most people in the class believed Paulina to be the most realistic character of all the ones met so far.
How do you think it affects the reader being presented with these types of characters in fictitious works?
Truc, what you say about drama being the main art form to be able to convey these "truths" is a very interesting one. Why so you think it is drama more than the other art forms that can do this?
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