Weales offers a mixed appraisal of the 1992 New York production of Dorfman'splay, finding the play's ambiguous ending frustrating. The critic did note, however, that the work deals with important issues and makes for adequate entertainment.

Somewhere beneath the slick and enervating surface of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, there are serious themes struggling to get out. The play is set in "a country that is probably Chile," one that has recently emerged from a dictatorship and has become, tentatively, a democracy. The question—one that is asked every day in Eastern Europe, in South and Central America, in Africa—is whether the new nearly democratic health of a country depends on the recognition and punishment of the oppressors from the past or whether the present is better served—as Mussolini's sexpot granddaughter was saying on television recently—by dismissing all that ugliness...