Death and the Maiden at Minneapolis Theater Garage on 11/8/08
By: David de Young
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| Delta Rae Giordano and Gabriele Angieri Jr. in Death and the Maiden - Publicity photo by Jon Behm |
The play, taking its name from a Schubert quartet, was written in 1991 and had its American premier that same year. Nimbus co-artistic director Liz Neerland takes the director’s helm for this one, and though Neerland has had success with edgy works in the past, this play ends up more soap opera than thriller.
15 years prior to the action, Paulina (Delta Rae Giordano) was raped and tortured by a band of unknown captors. Though blindfolded during the experience, she still recalls the voice of the gang leader, a man who loved Schubert and was fond of quoting Nietzsche. 15 years later a stranger, a doctor named Roberto Miranda (Gabriele Angieri Jr.), helps Paulina’s husband, Gerardo (Matthew Greseth) fix a flat tire. That same night the doctor is invited into their home where Paulina is convinced she recognizes him as her past assailant.
Nimbus faced a tough road with this production. The small cast of three requires 100 percent from each actor at all times, and each is on stage for a good portion of the 105 minute show. The script itself is challenging; a good chunk of it is comprised of heated arguments in which the actors must constantly cut off each others lines. As such it requires both passion and timing to be pulled off believably, and all three actors struggled with those qualities in this production. Right out of the gate an argument between Paulina and her husband seemed like it should have been shouted instead of merely spoken. Their delivery was flat, they lacked chemistry and the love between the couple was not apparent enough to be seen as cause for the lack of gusto in the fight.
The play picked up a little steam in an early scene between the two male actors. Though Angieri Jr. spends a good portion of the play in his underwear, bound to a chair and gagged, he’s still to be credited as the most dynamic of the three players. And it is he who delivers a telling line early on, “In this country everything always comes out into the open.”
And so it goes. Paulina puts the doctor on mock trial for his supposed crimes as her husband assists reluctantly, warning her repeatedly of “serious consequences.”
I am not sure who is to blame here for this play’s failure to engage, Dorfman’s script, the actors, or Neerland, but probably a healthy mixture of each. I could not suspend belief long enough to stay on the story and get away from the studied, soap-opera-like performances. The realism of the neat and multi-functional set also contrasted with the lack of realism of the performance. In one scene Paulina takes the doctor to the toilet at gunpoint, and moments later we hear him peeing like a racehorse off stage. I’m no urologist, but I find it hard to believe a 50+ year old man would pee so forcefully in front of a strange woman holding a gun to his back that it would be heard all the way in the living room, even if he really had to go. That said, the script seems to lend itself more to a film than a play, and was in fact dramatized for the screen in 1994 by Roman Polanski.
The Nimbus production leaves it up to the audience to determine if the doctor is guilty or not. He makes a good case for his own innocence in that the evidence against him - Schubert, the feel of his skin, his smell, and even the fact that he corrected items in his confession to make them match Paulina’s recollection - is all circumstantial. When he claims Paulina is “absolutely insane,” you believe him, and perhaps unfortunately for the production, you never develop enough sympathy for her to find it anything but annoying and unbelievable that she chose vigilantism over the process of law to see this through.
Despite these criticisms, the audience still appeared on the edge of their seats by the end, eager to see how things would all turn out. And nimbus agilely preserves ambiguity into the final scene.
Watch the trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5oQFam4YIg
Death and the Maiden runs through November 30th at the Minneapolis Theater Garage. Tickets from http://www.nimbustheatre.com or 651-229-3122.
Location Info:
Minneapolis Theater Garage
Artist Info: nimbus theatre
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