"Death and the Maiden' and Duke U. lacrosse

Rush to judgment: Death, the maiden,
Ariel Dorfman and the Duke U. lacrosse scandal

JIM RUTTER

After seeing the Curio Theatre’s production of Death and the Maiden, I struggled to determine whose side the playwright took.

Ariel Dorfman’s play is set in an unnamed South American country recently emerging into democracy after years of brutal dictatorship. It opens on the Good Samaritan Dr. Miranda assisting the human rights lawyer Gerardo Escobar after the latter suffers a flat tire with no spare. Once home, Gerardo’s wife Paulina overhears the two men talking, and immediately believes that Miranda is the same doctor who enabled her torture during her imprisonment under the former regime.

Seeking revenge over justice, Paulina binds Dr. Miranda, and while her husband pleads for Dr. Miranda’s right to due process, she subjects the doctor to a mock trial for his alleged participation in the atrocities, eventually forcing a signed confession of his guilt.

Both Dorfman’s play and Curio’s production present an evenhanded approach to the evidence or lack thereof: Paulina suffers post-traumatic stress disorder, her husband fears another relapse, and Miranda may or may not correct elements of her story. However, what concerns me is which set of processes Dorfman truly endorses or seeks to dissuade in his play: the sanctified (though flawed) investigatory commission that her husband heads to uncover the truth, or Paulina’s own “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to justice for the crimes committed against her.

Dorfman’s role in the Duke 88

After doing a bit of biographical research on Dorfman— who fled Pinochet’s brutal rule in Chile—I think I’ve arrived at a definitive answer. The deciding factor, a line from Dorfman’s Wikipedia entry:

“He [Dorfman] also is one of the Duke 88. These are the professors who, in the wake of the Lacrosse players scandal, signed a letter calling for a campus discussion about the way the Duke community viewed race and gender. The letter was then published as a full-page ad in local newspapers and reprinted across the country.”

Wikipedia's ad-hoc entry downplays both the content and intentions of the letter that Dorfman signed (he did not draft it) within weeks of the alleged rape of a dancer hired by Duke lacrosse players for a house party. The second sentence of that letter begins with a shocking assertion: “Regardless of the results of the police investigation,” before taking the side of the false accuser by stating, “These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves…” [The italics are mine.]

The “listening letter” (as the signers titled it) ends on an encouraging and congratulatory note. “The students know that the disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides…To the students speaking individually and to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.”

That “listening letter” appeared, of course, before this year, when all charges against the Duke lacrosse players were dropped and the prosecutor who filed them was found guilty of criminal contempt, sent to jail for one day, and disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation."

A lesson from The Crucible

Beyond the harm the student protests engendered (two Duke students expelled, death threats against the team and their coach), as a playwright, Dorfman should know better. Affixing one’s name to a public document represents a significant and sanctioning political act. The penultimate scene of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible hinges upon this point: John Proctor dies rather than sign a false confession that he knows will only bestow greater (though false) legitimacy on a tribunal seeking justification for those it has already executed in Salem. In Dorfman’s own play, Paulina’s final vengeance-laced explosion results from Dr. Miranda’s similar refusal, as he knows that signing an extorted confession will only result in further harm against himself and others.

In an ironic imitation, Dorfman signed the Duke “listening letter” 15 years after first publishing Death and the Maiden— the same interval that transpires in the play between the events of Paulina’s torture and her encounter with Dr. Miranda.

I hate to speculate about anyone’s intentions. Perhaps Dorfman underwent the process common to many intellectuals (Bertolt Brecht comes to mind) who journey from classical, human-rights-endorsing liberalism to the Marcusian/Marxist variant. In this process, customarily, a patient faith in due process in a given situation yields to an impatient endorsement of redistributionist justice to redress past crimes.

The question answered

But what do Dorfman’s recent actions say about Death and the Maiden?

In his play, Paulina wants revenge without evidence or conviction, and without an appeal to the due process that would, one hopes, exonerate or condemn Miranda objectively. In his own life, Dorfman signed his name to a document that seemingly encourages a similar denial of due process for the accused Duke lacrosse players.

As a critic, I fully appreciate the tremendous aesthetic value of Death and the Maiden, especially in Curio’s superb production. As a human being, I finally understand the play’s dangerous theme. Paulina and Dorfman, apparently, are the same.



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