SOURCE: Weales, Gerald. “Go Ahead, Shoot.” Commonweal 120, no. 9 (8 May 1992): 21.

In the following review, Weales argues that, despite Dorfman's “elegant” plot, Death and the Maiden fails to engage the audience or make the characters and plot believable.

Somewhere beneath the slick and enervating surface of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, there are serious themes struggling to get out. The play is set in “a country that is probably Chile,” one that has recently emerged from a dictatorship and has become, tentatively, a democracy. The question—one that is asked every day in Eastern Europe, in South and Central America, in Africa—is whether the new nearly democratic health of a country depends on the recognition and punishment of the oppressors from the past or whether the present is better served—as Mussolini's sexpot granddaughter was saying on television recently—by dismissing all that ugliness as history. In Dorfman's...