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The rise and fall of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden is a subject worthy of close scrutiny, particularly now, following the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in Britain on 16 October 1998 at the request of the Spanish judiciary. How did a play that addresses a specific Chilean political issue become one of the most celebrated dramas of its time? How was the play's critical and commercial success the result of a fragile conjunction of forces at a point of historical time as well as theatrical space? How was this singularly successful play able to address and adapt to different political and theatrical contexts? And finally, by what means and to what ends was this unusually resonant and oddly postmodern form of political theater ultimately, perhaps inevitably, stripped of virtually all its political and much of its dramatic urgency and transformed into mere play, simple spectacle?
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The long foreground of Death and the Maiden begins with the experience of one of the author's Chilean friends who, having been arrested, tortured, and exiled in the early 1980s, returned home nearly a year later only to find that his family "had erased the whole incident from their memories" (Dorf man qtd. in Rohter). Theirs was, Dorfman knew, a willed amnesia not at all uncommon in Chile during the seventeen years of Pinochet's brutal military dictatorship. In July 1990, four months after the peaceful but still fragüe transfer of power to a democratically elected government led by President Patricio Aylwin, Dorfman returned, his own exile over, and found both the catalyst he needed to give his friend's experience the appropriate literary shape that had eluded him for so long and a compelling reason to transform the anguish of that friend's private drama into public performance even now that democracy had replaced dictatorship. The catalyst was the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation established on 20 April 1990 and charged with investigating abuses of power that had occurred during Pinochet's reign of terror. The commission's powers were, however, doubly limited. It could neither name (let alone judge) those who had committed or been responsible for the abuses, nor could it investigate any cases other than ones that had ended either in death or in the presumption of death. In...