The play “Death and the Maiden” was written by Ariel Dorfman in 1991 and it tells the story of a woman and man still recovering from the effects of violence in their home country. This is closely related to the playwright’s experience since she had just come from Chile which had been ruled by a dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. Research into his regime suggests it was very violent and regularly used terrorism to keep people in line, so people have speculated that some of the events in the play might have been true for Dorfman or people she knew.

The action of the play takes place in a remote beach house, but we don’t know just where this beach house is so it could be any country anywhere. What we do know about the country where the house is located is that it has just emerged from a dictatorship much like the one that Chile had experienced. Although the people are living mostly peacefully, they are still dealing with the effects of torture and violence from the past. The main characters in the play are Gerardo who is making his way as an attorney, and his wife Paulina. While Gerardo is finding a great deal of success since he was just given a presidential commission to work on human rights violations from the past, Paulina is having trouble dealing with her PTSD over the treatment she received herself, especially the time that she was raped and tortured by a doctor whose face she never saw but who played Schubert’s string quartet #14, also known as “Death and the Maiden.” When Gerardo’s car breaks down on the way home one night, he is given a ride by an older man named Dr. Roberto Miranda who is invited to stay for the night and Paulina becomes convinced that he is her assailant from that time based just on his voice, his skin, and his smell.

While the play is meant to convey a deep sense of danger and menace, Paulina spends a lot of time with a gun in her hand threatening Roberto for example, the way that she traps him at the house and forces an informal inquiry with Gerardo does not seem especially believable, such as Paulina sneaking out and hiding Roberto’s car so that he cannot get away. It also seems strange that two men who pride themselves on being so manly are unable to figure out a way to overpower a distraught woman who is not thinking clearly. Gerardo’s plan to record Paulina’s testimony and give it to Roberto to use for his false confession, after convincing Roberto that a false confession is the best way to calm Paulina down, also seems off somehow for a rising attorney. As they work through these different plot twists, we also find out that there was earlier betrayal between Paulina and Gerardo since she discovered him in bed with another woman when she first escaped from her torturers.

Thus, the fact that she doesn’t trust Roberto’s confession at the end is not surprising. She has no reason to trust either man’s sincerity through the process and claims she slipped inaccuracies into her testimony to Gerardo to see if Roberto would correct them accidentally, which he did and which prove that she never trusted either man through the process. When she puts the gun to Roberto’s head, the play prevents us from finding out what actually happened to Roberto by forcing us to question our own motives and relative victimhood or abuser status. In the end, the play offers no resolutions for the audience or for the characters making it seem very unsatisfying but forcing questions about it to continue circulating in the mind.