SOURCE: Stavans, Ilan. Review of Death and the Maiden, by Ariel Dorfman. World Literature Today 67, no. 3 (summer 1993): 596.

In the following review, Stavans lauds the powerful ambiguity of Dorfman's narrative in Death and the Maiden, arguing that the play is “full of action and disarming ideas.”

The Chilean novelist and critic Ariel Dorfman's 1990 play Death and the Maiden (the title comes from a Schubert quartet) has the taste of a tautly constructed classic. Although its cast is minimal (three characters), it is full of action and disarming ideas. Divided into three acts and set in Chile or in “any country that has given itself a democratic government” just after a long period of repression, it is built around an unresolved mystery. Paulina Salas, the forty-year-old wife of a wealthy lawyer who is asked to serve on a commission investigating crimes committed by the military junta, was raped and tortured...