Death and the Maiden
erin fitzpatrick, copy editor

Community theatre, with its low budgets and amateur casts, seems especially threatened by the action movies that have come to epitomize the ultimate North American entertainment experience. How can the costume swords and off-stage screams of a Shakespearean battle scene ever hope to compete with multi-million dollar aliens, explosions, and set designs?

Put simply, they can't, but theatre does and always will have something that the big screen can't touch: an atmosphere of intimacy. Cinematography is a beautiful art, but it separates us from the experience, puts a screen between the audience and the story and turns the experience into an art form to be admired; something created, not real. But live theatre offers no such comfort. There is something powerful about being alone in a room with real people as they suffer the story you're watching. The camera isn't there to edit out the smells, the grimaces, or even the occasional mistakes that make live acting so intensely human. To survive, good theatre needs to draw on its inherent intimacy, humanity and simplicity. Psychological drama and the struggles between ordinary people are the stuff that play well on a stage and leave audiences more profoundly affected than a night out at the movies could ever hope to.

Death and the Maiden is an example of this kind of theatre. Put on by Vancouver's KLaSH theatre company, Ariel Dorfman's Pullitzer Prize winning play centers around one night in the Escobar household, where Paulina's husband Gerardo has invited a seemingly good samaritan in for drinks. Gerardo tells his guest, Dr. Miranda, that "my wife makes a margarita that will make your hair stand on end," but Paulina has more than drinks in mind for Dr. Miranda. She recognizes his voice as the one that whispered in her ear while its owner systematically tortured and raped her during the months she was abducted by General Augosto Pinochet's gestapo.

When General Augosto Pinochet came to power in Chile in 1973, he began a reign of terror. An estimated 3,000 Chileans, many of them students, disappeared and were tortured. Until Pinochet stepped down after a 1990 referendum, his countrypeople suffered genocide, torture and murder; those who survived their disappearance describe electric shocks to the genitals, simulated executions and the suffocation of victims in excrement-contaminated tanks. Participation in these atrocities weren't limited to the men of Pinochet's army; when a dictator remains in power for almost twenty years, teachers, doctors - even barbers and farmers - will have to take part at some point, and become either victim or oppressor.

Chile is collectively trying to forgive and forget but for many, like Paulina, the scars run too deep. In an attempt to heal her deep psychological wounds - at least this is what she tells Gerardo, her reluctant accomplice - she needs to tie Dr. Miranda up and force him to confess and repent before she can forgive him. But in the end, Paulina finds that truth is not so simple, forgiveness is not so easy and forgetting is nearly impossible.

Death and the Maiden, then, is a timely play that probes the essence of what we are capable of while it exposes the spindly legs of civility. This is what makes the play worth seeing; unfortunately it is also what makes watching the KLaSH production so frustrating. The play has enormous potential but generally, the actors don't seem up to the task.

Krista Levar, who plays the principal character Paulina Escobar, is convincing as a tormented rape victim and former political prisoner, but only at any one time; her overall performance leaves more to be desired.

Levar stays on one level - a kind of bitchy I've-got-you-now level - throughout the play. She treats her rapist with the same level of contempt as she treats her husband when he is home late for dinner. She would have done well to have rounded Paulina out more, and shown occasional fear, desperation, sadness or even hope.

Francisco Trujillo is better as Dr. Miranda. The fact that he has to lie throughout the play forces him to different levels and he is believable at every one of them. He even gets the audience to sympathize with him.

However, Lonnie McDonald's portrayal of Gerardo is so unconvincing as to be distracting. He whines from beginning to end, showing us only three moments of tenderness and one moment of anger. His inability to act as both a man in love and a man at an ethical crossroads detracts from the emotional impact of the play.

To be fair, what I saw was just a preview and there is an expression in theatre: 'If the dress rehearsal is bad, the show will be a success.' In general, Death and the Maiden is a riveting and surprising play. And wouldn't you rather be made to think by three inexperienced actors than have all the manpower behind Lucasfilm completely stop your thought processes for an evening?

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