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Powerful play from Pulitzer Prize-winning author featured at CAST
CAST Theatre and Columbia River Fellowship for Peace are bringing
the Pulitzer Prize-winning moral thriller “Death and the Maiden”
to
Hood
River
beginning Thursday.
The play, which contains mature themes and language, explores the
questions of justice, revenge and the consequences of repression
for both victims and perpetrators of torture, according to
director Judie Hanel.
“The play really isn’t about torture,” she said, “but about
memory, forgiveness, betrayal, dignity, uncertainty, love,
intimacy and darkness.”
“Death and the Maiden” is set in a country that has just emerged
from a long period of military dictatorship, during which time one
of the characters, Paulina (played by Desiree Amyx-Mackintosh),
had been tortured. Even though many years have passed, she still
finds herself haunted by the experience.
The play’s title comes from a classical music piece by Franz
Schubert that was a favorite of Paulina’s until it was played
repeatedly during her torture sessions.
Paulina’s husband, Gerardo (Will Thayer-Daugherty), has just been
appointed by the president to a commission that will examine human
rights abuses that occurred during the dictatorship; but, much to
Paulina’s outrage, only abuses that resulted in death.
Early in the play Gerardo invites a stranger, Dr. Roberto Miranda
(Rich McBride), into their beach home, after the doctor had helped
him with a flat tire. When Paulina hears the man’s voice she is
convinced it is the same man who had tortured her as she lay
blindfolded in a military detention center years before.
“One of the most disturbing effects on survivors of torture is
that, given the amnesty typically granted the past regime — on the
view that it is best to let the past be the past and not further
upset the military — they are bound to run into their former
torturers,” Hanel said. “They are still the doctors that the
regime recruited; the postal worker; the bus driver — those, in
effect, running the country.”
How Paulina chooses to deal with this chance meeting distresses
her husband, who believes her actions are no better than those of
her former captors. But Paulina demands that her torturer be
brought to justice, and takes matters into her own hands.
“Paulina has no good solution to her sorrows; whatever she does,
the past cannot be erased; her pain eradicated,” Hanel said. “Only
her fierce dignity; her discovery that she is not like the man who
destroyed her body — or is she?”
“Death and the Maiden” opened in London in 1991 and won the Time
Out Award for best play, then went on to win the Antoinette “Tony”
Perry Award during its Broadway run. It was written by Ariel
Dorfman in the mid-1980s when he was in exile from Chile, which
was under the military dictatorship of Gen. Pinochet.
n
The play will run for
three weekends. Tickets are $15 adults; $12 seniors/students and
are available at Waucoma Bookstore and the Columbia Center for the
Arts in Hood River, Collage of the Gorge in White Salmon, and
online at www.columbiaarts.org.
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