RALEIGH -- Hot Summer Nights at the Kennedy takes a break from comedies and musicals to mount Ariel Dorfman's harrowing moral thriller, "Death and the Maiden." Despite some blemishes, the production delivers gripping, edge-of-your-seat entertainment, along with thought-provoking questions about justice and forgiveness.
Dorfman, a literature and Latin American studies professor at Duke, drew on his years in Chile to pen his 1991 play about the long-term effects of repressive governments. The setting is an unnamed Latin American country where Paulina, a former political prisoner who was tortured and raped, is trying to live quietly with her husband, Gerardo.
One night, a stranger assists Gerardo with a flat tire. Gerardo invites the genial Roberto home for drinks, where Paulina suddenly thinks she recognizes him as her former torturer. She takes matters into her own hands, tying up Roberto and holding him and her protesting husband at gunpoint, insisting the stranger is the one who caused her so much physical and mental pain.
Gerardo thinks it's another of Paulina's disturbed delusions and worries the incident will sabotage his work investigating the previous government's atrocities. Roberto threatens to bring Gerardo down if he's not let go, while Paulina desperately tries to convince Gerardo she's right. Dorfman keeps the audience guessing as past secrets and incriminating details pile up.
Tony nominee Alan Campbell proves his range as Gerardo, torn by his wife's need for revenge and his own wish to move forward, and gives him a genuinely caring nature. David McClutchey turns in a subtle performance as Roberto, lacing his protestations of innocence with just enough hesitation to instill doubt they are true.
He also deserves credit for having to perform for most of this 90-minute one-act bound head to foot. Benji Taylor Jones projects Paulina's unhinged hysteria believably and is moving in her frank descriptions of the torture, but diminishes much of her performance by speaking too quietly or too rapidly in critical passages.
Director Adam Twiss skillfully builds tension, allowing some grim humor for occasional relief. Designer Chris Bernier's realistic house becomes a liability through awkward, disruptive scene shifts, which could have been made with lighting changes on a simpler set. Twiss has not solved the script's staging challenges, several important scenes being played too far from most of the audience.
Even so, the production is extremely affecting. The script's strong language and clinical descriptions of torture should not keep the avid theatergoer from seeing this absorbing drama.
