SOURCE: Gregory, Stephen. “Ariel Dorfman and Harold Pinter: Politics of the Periphery and Theater of the Metropolis.” Comparative Drama 30, no. 3 (fall 1996): 325-45.

In the following essay, Gregory investigates the influence of Harold Pinter on Dorfman's work, concluding that the two writers both focus heavily on “issues of the interaction of politics and language and of the mental and physical abuse of the rebellious and the powerless.”

The skeleton of this article is what looks like a string of contingencies. The Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman's first book was a lengthy study of Harold Pinter's first play The Room (1957).¹ Some twenty years later, Pinter would date his political reawakening from the same coup in Chile by General Pinochet in 1973 that would condemn Dorfman to a seventeen-year exile.² In the mid to late 1980's, Pinter wrote two brutally stark political plays about torture and repression.³ Shortly afterwards, Dorfman dedicated to Harold...