We’re only 30 minutes into the play, when the till-now frail Paulina Salas, acts swiftly: In a matter of minutes, she knocks her husband Gerardo Escobar’s guest unconscious, drags him out of their spare room where he had retired for the night, heaves his body onto herself, and props him onto a living room chair where, finally, she leaves him tied for the rest of the play.
This very physical and breathless sequence of events really drives the action forward in Death and the Maiden, directed by Vidushi Mehra. She is also the protagonist in this adaptation of the three-character play, originally written in 1990 by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman. The drama’s opening scenes are otherwise slow and stifling. Perhaps aptly so, with Gerardo (Samar Sarila) and Paulina skirting issues of unacknowledged trauma, with doses of marital arguments.
The plot, set in post-Pinochet Chile spotlights a personal engagement with the new government’s efforts to inquire into human atrocities committed during the regime. Gerardo, a lawyer, is called to head this inquiry. But what he doesn’t reveal to his colleagues is that Paulina too is a victim, having been raped by a medical doctor, Roberto Miranda (Adhiraj Katoch), who’d offer the regime his consultation on prisoner ‘treatment’. And what Paulina in turn reveals to him only the morning after taking their guest hostage, is that very doctor is the one in their home.
Sarila, despite his slight awkwardness in chemistry with Mehra, embodies the tragedy implicit in his character. Torn between his professional idealism of believing innocence before proof of guilt, and his personal empathy for his wife’s trauma, Gerardo is helpless.
The original dialogue too captures this. “I’m tired of being in the middle, in between the two of you. You reach an understanding with her, you convince her,” he says to Miranda. This might as well be a comment on how the system is stuck between wanting to provide justice to a wronged and silenced population, in an atmosphere where there might be no ‘rational’ proof to implicate those involved in the excesses.
The fullness of each character leaves the audience on an edge — raw and ready for catharsis. But the Death and the Maiden offers none of that. In a 2015 interview to the New Yorker, Dorfman spoke of the play’s deliberate indeterminacy saying that it has “helped audiences around the world to interpret that drama as a mirror of their own national dilemmas.”
Katoch for his part is impressive in how much he achieves despite being tied up to the chair for over an hour. At one point in a scuffle between the gun-wielding Paulina and Miranda tied to a chair, he appeals to her to forgive so they can move on: “Isn’t it time we stopped?”
Mehra’s Paulina doesn’t hesitate: “Why does it always have to be the people like me who have to sacrifice,” she asks, her delivery and presence, despite being the most petite person on stage, most powerful. She stammers through Paulina’s bouts of hysteria fluidly, with tears welling up as she recounts details about the incident to Gerardo — things she’s never recalled before. Nearing the end, she’s spent. It takes her a few minutes to break out of character and bow.
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