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Denver Post Theater Critic |
Friday, March 01, 2002 -
Anyone who saw Roman Polanski's terrifying 1994 political thriller
"Death and the Maiden" can tell you without blinking
that the film starred Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley in the
horrific story of a woman who comes face-to-face with a man she
believes is the perverse doctor who tortured her 15 years earlier.
Anyone can tell you that because those performances left indelible impressions on the mind as lasting as seared flesh. But who remembers the third wheel, the poor guy who played Weaver's husband? Who remembers Stuart Wilson II?
Well, no one, which is one reason El Centro Su Teatro's new stage production of Ariel Dorfman's charged drama is worth revisiting.
Su Teatro may be the most grassroots, inclusive theater group in Denver. Its cast and audience represent a more encompassing cross-section of the community where it resides than perhaps any other in town. In casting "Maiden," fearless 23-year-old director Hugo E. Carbajal had to find three people who could pull off one of the more difficult acting challenges of the past decade - in two languages. A three-week run in English will be followed by a two-week run in the play's original Spanish.
The resulting "Maiden" voyage is uneven but interesting to watch because while the actor portraying the incomprehensibly evil doctor is appearing in his first dramatic play, the man playing the forgotten husband has been an accomplished local actor for more than 15 years.
The story takes place in a country where a democratic regime has taken over from a brutal dictatorship. The location is unnamed but presumably Chile, from which Dorfman was exiled in 1973. The story opens with a gun-toting Paulina Salas (Magally Rizo Antuna) quavering in the dark of her living room as her husband Gerardo Escobar (Phil Luna) is dropped off by a kind stranger named Dr. Roberto Miranda (Lawrence Gonzalez), who rescued him from a flat tire.
Gerardo has just been named to a committee assigned to investigate human-rights violations that resulted in death during the dictatorship. His wife was nearly one of them. Fifteen years earlier, she was a student kidnapped off the street, blindfolded and tortured. A man she knew only as "the doctor" was a brutal sadist who experimented on her and nearly 100 other victims just to explore the human body's tolerance for pain.
Paulina immediately recognizes this man's voice as "the doctor's," so she beats him, binds him and puts him "on trial," her only evidence locked in the black recesses of her memory and in the tortured notes of a Schubert symphony.
The film's lasting impression is the resulting dance between the victim and her presumed oppressor. Antuna and Gonzalez never come close to a believable level of sexual tension, fear, pathos or anger to make that the focus here. Glossed is the mountainous ethical conundrum posed by the doctor, whose plight either embodies the doomed repetition of this new "democracy" or the omnipresence of veiled evil in accepted society. Miranda is a pendulum that here is in need of a gigantic push: Gonzalez needs to show more of the victim at the onset and more palpable evil at the end.
But it is fascinating to see what else the story has to say when the strongest acting comes from the actor playing the husband. Gerardo's point of view mirrors the audience's evolving perceptions. He is a good and moral man who naively believes he can now right some wrongs. But as far as the more immediate drama unfolding in his own living room, he is, like us, in the dark.
Gerardo is at first convinced his wife is mad and conspires with the doctor to machinate his release. Even as he gradually begins to believe she might be right about this man, he grows consumed not with revenge but with the realization that her actions will ruin him politically. The real drama arrives when his carnal instincts finally rise to the surface to do equal battle with his moral indignation. We know Paulina believes this man should die. The more fascinating question is whether her husband, the man charged with bringing both vigilante cops and criminals to justice, is capable of helping her to carry that out.
The production often suffers from awkward pacing, underacting and garbled lines, but Carbajal surprises toward the end with some confrontational moments that exceed previously established expectations.
In a precurtain speech, artistic director Tony Garcia draws an unfortunate parallel between "Maiden" and the prisoners the U.S. is holding at Guantanamo Bay. Dorfman believed this play could take place anywhere, anytime, and it's best left set in the most frightening place imaginable - the sanctity of your own living room.