Ariel Dorfman carefully specifies in his stage directions that Death and the Maiden is set in "a country that is probably Chile but could be any country that has given itself a democratic government just after a long period of dictatorship." There is both a specificity and a universality to the play, as many critics have noted, making it extremely topical in the late-twentieth century era of tentative political transformation. Frank Rich of the New York Times, for example, called the play a "mousetrap designed to catch the conscience of an international audience at a historic moment when many more nations than Chile are moving from totalitarian terror to fragile freedom." John Butt similarly found the play "timely," saying that it catches the audience "in a neat moral trap" by making them "confront choices that most.....
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