DRAMA'S MOMENT OF TRUTH: US/TELL ME LIES ABOUT VIETNAM AND DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

Abstract

The paper offers a comparative analysis of two plays sharing a single concern with the tragic mechanism of historical repetition and its causes.  US, the collaborative dramatic experiment directed by PeterBrook in 1966, and its 1968 cinematic version Tell Me Lies About Vietnam,  re-mastered and released in 2012, and Death and the Maiden,  Ariel Dorfman’s 1990 play  about the failure of democracy in the post-Pinochet Chile,  both rest on the assumption that to adequately address the  history of war and holocaust requires more than the disclosure of factual truth. It demands a radical re-examination and alteration of identity - a process involving a kind of re-mythologizing that takes place on a deepest psychic level, the zone of our original core humanness which, buried under the layers of culturally acquired habit of denial, has become impenetrable to truth, and  to the reality of the other. The condition,  referred to as dis-imagination by  the Canadian philosopher Henry Giroux, has traditionally been a challenge to western art, particularly drama: thus, I will argue,  the governing purpose of Brook’s and Dorfman’s plays, is to  examine the possibilities open to drama of conquering denial and releasing the kind of sympathetic imagination crucial to non-hierarchical ‘I/Thou’ relationship  that used to regulate social life in  archaic communities, when, according to an increasing number of scientists, the biologically scripted empathy and solidarity were the only conceivable strategy of survival.