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-Howard Zinn
2003 |
Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman (born May 6, 1942) is a Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina since 1985. Personal
history and education
The son of Adolfo Dorfman, a prominent Argentinian professor of economics and the author of Historia de la Industria Argentina, Ariel Dorfman was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on May 6, 1942. Shortly after his birth, they moved to the United States and then, in 1954, moved to Chile. He attended and later worked as a professor at the University of Chile, becoming a Chilean citizen in 1967. From 1968 to 1969, he attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley and then returned to Chile.
His thesis on the absurd in plays of Harold
Pinter was published in Spanish as El absurdo entre cuatro paredes:
el teatro de Harold Pinter by Editorial Universitaria, in Santiago,
Chile, in 1968 (124 pages).[1]
Pinter later became a personal friend as well as an influence on Dorfman's
work and political thinking.[2]
Since the restoration of democracy in Chile, in 1990, he has divided his time between Santiago and the United States.
Career
Since 1985 he has taught at Duke
University, where he is currently Walter Hines Page Research
Professor of Literature and Professor of Latin American Studies. Dorfman
details his life of exile and bi-cultural living in his memoir, Heading
South, Looking North, which has been acclaimed by Elie
Wiesel, Nadine Gordimer, Thomas Keneally and others.
Dorfman's work often deals with the horrors of tyranny
and, in later works, the trials of exile. His most famous play, Death and the Maiden, describes the
encounter of a former torture victim with the man she believed tortured her;
it was made into a film in 1994 by Roman
Polanski starring Sigourney
Weaver and Ben Kingsley.
A critic of Pinochet, he has written extensively about
the General's extradition case for the Spanish newspaper El
País and other publications, and in the book Exorcising
Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Dorfman's works have been translated into more than 40 languages and performed in over 100 countries. Besides poetry, essays and novels— Hard Rain, winner of the Sudamericana Award; Widows; The Last Song of Manuel Sendero; Mascara; Konfidenz; The Nanny and the Iceberg, and Blake’s Therapy—he has written short stories, including My House Is on Fire, and general nonfiction including The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds. He has won various international awards, including two Kennedy Center Theater Awards.
In 1996, with his son, Rodrigo, he received an award for
best television drama in Britain for Prisoners in Time. His poems,
collected in Last Waltz in Santiago and In Case of Fire in a Foreign
Land, have been turned into a half-hour fictional film, Deadline,
featuring the voices of Emma Thompson, Bono, Harold
Pinter, and others.
Dorfman’s human rights play, Speak Truth to Power:
Voices from Beyond the Dark[3] (based on
interviews with human rights defenders conducted by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo), premiered at the Kennedy
Center in Washington, D.C., in 2000, and subsequently
aired on PBS
as part of its Great Performances series. The play starred Kevin
Kline, Sigourney
Weaver, Alec Baldwin, and John
Malkovich, among others, and was directed by Greg Mosher. It
has gone on to numerous performances around the world, including a run in New
York City.
Dorfman's play The Other Side had its world
premiere at the New National Theatre in Tokyo, Japan in 2004 and opened off-Broadway at
the Manhattan Theater Club in 2005. Other recent plays include Purgatorio
at the Seattle
Rep in 2005 and at the Arcola Theatre in London’s West
End in 2008; Picasso’s Closet, a counterfactual history in which the
Nazis murder Picasso,
had its premiere at Theater J in Washington, D.C. in 2006.[4] His latest works include the Lowell Thomas Award-winning
travel book, Desert Memories; a collection of essays, Other
Septembers, Many Americas; and a novel he wrote with his youngest son,
Joaquín, Burning City. In 2007, his musical, Dancing Shadows,
opened in Seoul, Korea. This
collaboration with Eric Woolfson, the principle composer for the Alan Parsons
Project, won five Korean “Tony” awards.
He is also the subject of a feature-length documentary, A
Promise to the Dead, based on his memoir Heading South, Looking North
and directed by Peter Raymont. The film had its world premiere at the 2007 Toronto International Film
Festival on September
8, 2007. In November
2007, the film was named by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences as one of 15 films on its documentary feature Oscar
shortlist. The list was narrowed to five films on January 22, 2008,[5] and A Promise
to the Dead was not among the five Oscar-nominated documentaries.
Dorfman currently has several film projects in
development with his sons, Rodrigo and Joaquín [1],
including a screen adaptation of his novel, Blake’s Therapy.
Dorfman also writes regularly for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, The Guardian (where he has a featured blog), Le
Monde, and L'Unita. He is a member of L'Académie
Universelle des Cultures, in Paris, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Controversy
Dorfman also is one of the Group of 88 professors who, in
the wake of the Lacrosse players scandal,
signed a controversial letter thanking protesters for "making a
collective noise" on "what happened to this young woman"
- assumed to be rape.[6] The letter,
which was later published as a full page ad in local newspapers and reprinted
across the country, has been widely criticized as a prejudgment; later it was
determined that no sexual assault had occurred.[7][8][9] The charges
against the players were eventually dismissed and the District Attorney, Michael
Nifong who prosecuted the case, was disbarred. Selected
books
References
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Copyright (c) 2002-11, Subversive Theatre Collective. All rights reserved. |
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About the Author
of WIDOWS 