Stage

...Paulina recognizes (or thinks she does) Miranda as the Schubert-loving doctor who led her torturers...

...It may be a bit of male bonding...

...Escobar's motivation is nicely unclear...

...In Dorfman's play there are advocates of recognition and of punishment, although not necessarily of both...

...Everything is as elegant and sterile as Tony Walton's set...

...she ties him up, demands a mock trial, threatens to be judge and executioner...

...Although moral problems can certainly be carried by a thriller or a mystery, here the emphasis is on the is-he-or-isn't-he of Miranda and the possibility that Paulina may have been driven mad by her experience...

...we learn that while Paulina was under arrest, risking her life to protect Escobar's name, he was having an affair...

...I found myself sympathizing not with the characters but with Stockard Channing, who worked hard to give depth to still another Guare heroine, and particularly with Eugene Perry, who plays Eros as a malevolent leprechaun and is forced to sing all his lines to Stephen Edwards's nondescript music...

...There is some Guare jokiness, some kiddie comedy, and an overdose of pretentiousness...

...The play is set in "a country that is probably Chile," one that has recently emerged from a dictatorship and has become, tentatively, a democracy...

...Dorfman may intend a final ambiguity to an ambiguous play—a testimony to Paulina's unwillingness to act as her torturers did, an indication that the past is to be smoothed over by social ritual, or, given the look exchanged between Paulina and Miranda, a confession that the questions the play presumably faces are questions still...

...Put your clothes on, Perry, I wanted to say, and go see if Peter Sellars has another opera in which you can stretch yourself...

...after all, we do not want to be like them...

...There, the three principals, formally dressed, arrive at a concert to hear a little Schubert...

...They intend their example to free the children from the pitfalls of suburban living, but they are unable to accept, until too late, his son's and her daughter's desire and/or love for one another...

...STAGE GO AHEAD, SHOOT 'DEATH & THE MAIDEN' & 'BABOONS' Somewhere beneath the slick and enervating surface of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, there are serious themes struggling to get out...

...He may be afraid that Paulina's irrational behavior will wreck his career, stain his growing importance within the new government...

...Paulina either will or will not kill him...

...His distress at Paulina's homemade vengeance may result from his belief in proper legal proceedings, even though he knows that the judiciary is still shot through with appointees of the old regime...

...Part of the problem lies with Dorfman...

...In the next to last scene, Escobar having been sent offstage, Paulina listens to Miranda's confession and decides to kill him anyway...

...The question—one that is asked every day in Eastern Europe, in South and Central America, in Africa—is whether the new nearly democratic health of a country depends on the recognition and punishment of the oppressors from the past or whether the present is better served—as Mussolini's sexpot granddaughter was saying on television recently—by dismissing all that ugliness as history...

...By comparison with John Guare's Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, Death and the Maiden seems positively profound...

...That blackout on the gun-wielding Paulina is a case in point...

...Penny and Philip, having refound one another, dump their respective spouses and, finding their new marriage liberating, run off to an archaeological dig in Sicily (where Eros is hanging around), and bring the children of their two marriages to visit them...

...Circumstances provide an occasion...

...Gerardo Escobar (Richard Dreyfuss) is a lawyer who has been named to a commission, with minimal power, that will investigate charges of wrongdoing—very wrongdoing in the past...

...Roberto Miranda (Gene Hackman), who has earlier rescued Escobar, stranded on the road by a plot device, drops by in the middle of the night to congratulate Escobar or perhaps to soften him up in case his name should come up in the hearings...

...Escobar finally sides with Miranda and feeds him information, which he may not need, for the confession Paulina demands...

...The three stars, all of whom have done admirable work elsewhere, seem simply to be going through the motions of performance...

...His wife, Paulina Salas (Glenn Close), who was raped and tortured in an attempt to extract information from her, is understandably obsessed by what happened to her and aches to punish the villains...

...All this leads to death, separation, and, perhaps, rebirth for Penny and some of the children...

...It comes across not as her hesitation, but as a directorial tease, an attempt to pump suspense into a flaccid melodrama...

...In the published play, Dorfman asks for a mirror to descend so that the audience can see itself while a spotlight picks out one playgoer after another...

...After an impassioned speech about the way victims are expected to act in a civilized way ("And why does it always have to be people like me who have to sacrifice"), she holds a gun to his head and...blackout...

...Escobar is potentially the most interesting character...

...At the heart of Guare's play there is a tangle of ideas about the difficulty of telling love from lust and the dangers involved in confusing the two...

...More of the blame lies with director Mike Nichols...

...If the play were to work at all, it would have to have a strong underlay of passion and peril, but it is about as frightening as the animated doughnut that passes onstage for a live volcano (Tony Walton again...

...I found I did not believe in any of the characters nor care about their dilemmas which meant that it was also difficult to dig for the half-buried serious themes...

...If this sounds like an interesting—even an important—play, it certainly did not seem so in the theater...

...Miranda either is or is not the torture doctor...

...GERALD WEALES Commonweal 8 May 1992: 21...

...This effect would presumably generalize the theme, take the play away from Paulina, who may or may not be mad, and prepare for the final scene...