Credit playwright Ariel Dorfman for creating a play that wastes no time bringing its audience into a suspense-filled world where anything can happen. His is a lean, energized vision that does justice to his tale about atrocities performed under a totalitarian government.
The play has three characters: Paulina (Susan Block), a woman crippled by her kidnapping and torture 15 years ago when she was a student and believed to have knowledge about her then underground newspaper editor boyfriend, Gerardo Escobar (David Tatosian), who is now her husband and on the brink of being appointed to a human rights commission charged with investigating abuses by the previous regime, and Roberto (Danne W. Taylor) a physician who comes into their lives and who may or may not know more about Paulina’s past then one would first assume. The doctor, Roberto, has played the role of Good Samaritan and has helped Gerardo get home after he has a flat tire. Once in the Escobar’s home, Paulina recognizes the voice of the doctor as one of her chief torturers, and that voice, along with the doctor’s predilection for Shubert, convinces her he was the man responsible for the repeated rape and abuse she suffered so many years ago. Paulina pistol whips the doctor, ties him to a chair and stages a mock “trial” where the outraged doctor must confess his crimes to spare his life. Most of the play deals with this tense situation and sets us up to wonder if the doctor was the man Paulina thinks he is, as well as considering larger questions about vengeance and justice.
Unfortunately, with Red Wolf Theater Company’s community theater level production values, and David Tatosian’s uninspired direction, most of the life in Dorfman’s drama is excised. The set design, attributed only to “Red Wolf,” stands as a good symbol for the lack of professionalism. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that the action takes place in the Escobar’s desolate beach house, while a storm rages outside. This physical setting isolates the characters, and the storm gives a Lear-like ambience to the proceedings. Red Wolf’s set design is bare, suggesting nothing more than a black-and-white stage, let alone a beach house. Where were the touches that might have made us believe that this was a real world?
The performances follow the lack of inspiration in the scenic design. Susan Block’s Paulina is shrill and one-note. Because she doesn’t modulate her performance with anything resembling a real human being, it’s difficult for the audience to question whether she’s right in her assumptions about the doctor. She just seems like a crazy lady. David Tatosian, directing himself as her husband, fails to create a character who has any empathy, let alone sympathy, for the wife who suffered horrific abuse to save his ass. Tatosian seems annoyed with his wife, instead of outraged. He stumbles over his lines and is curiously unanimated when he makes the play’s final speech, a speech which should have provided a denouement, but leaves the audience feeling flat and unsatisfied. As the physician who may or may not have tortured Paulina in her youth, Danne Taylor is, at best, adequate, offering us no ambiguity, which is essential to making the play work: we must wonder if this man was capable of the crimes of which he’s being accused.