STAGE : Caretaker of the Missing : Chilean author Ariel Dorfman wrote of <i> los desaparecidos</i> in his novel ‘Widows’; now he’s preserving their memory on stage

Missing .

Until Sept. 11, 1973, it was a word that meant no more to Ariel Dorfman than a misplaced bill or phone message. But after that fateful date, when the elected government of Chile’s President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup financed and supported by the U.S. government, the word changed.

Dissidents were rounded up, and the giant soccer stadium in the capital of Santiago was transformed into a huge concentration camp. With Allende dead, his allies were the next likely corpses. Among them Dorfman, then a University of Chile professor of Latin American literature and author of a study of Harold Pinter’s plays, and (with co-author Armand Mattelart) an unlikely best-selling critique of American pop culture, “How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic.” He was also working for the government’s communication arm, producing a magazine for teen-agers, TV programs and a comic book series.

Hiding at a friend’s apartment during the coup, Dorfman watched the events on television. Then, the crucial image appeared on the screen, the image that told him to leave the country: A soldier held up a copy of “How to Read Donald Duck” and tossed it onto a pyre of burning books.

Exiled in Paris, he longed for his homeland. And soon, his friends who stayed behind joined the ranks of the missing. Indeed, “Missing” was the title of Dorfman’s friend Costa-Gavras’ film about the Chilean military’s takeover and practice of making people “disappear”--that is, liquidating dissidents while claiming to know nothing about them.

This silent, deadly method--one of Hitler’s tactics--began to bore into Dorfman’s imagination, though it had been chilled into writer’s block by the sudden trauma of exile. With one novel, “Moros en la Costa,” under his belt (appearing only last year in English under the title “Hard Rain”), he decided that the next would be about los desaparecidos --the disappeared.

In Amsterdam, 1978, Dorfman began the novel, titled “Widows.” Thirteen years later, he is seeing its long-awaited stage adaptation at the Mark Taper Forum where it opens Wednesday.

Between then and now, the 49-year-old Dorfman has assumed the mantle from the late poet Pablo Neruda as Chile’s leading literary voice, and gained notoriety as a controversial spokesman for human rights and a critic of U.S. foreign policy. (Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) once decried Dorfman as “one of the prime disinformation agents of the radical Chilean left.”)

Intensely drawn to his subject, glasses accentuating his penetrating eyes, Dorfman stresses in a conversation that “Widows” rises above any particular political moment or bent. He describes the work, co-adapted with playwright Tony Kushner, as “an epic tragedy, with elements of ‘Antigone’ and ‘The Trojan Women,’ an allegory about no matter how much you want to bury the murdered bodies of the past, they’ll appear.”

Yet this very substantial material was literally fashioned out of nothingness.

While several of his Chilean friends--though none of his family--were tortured and vanished from sight, Dorfman says “the basic reason I became obsessed with disappearance is because my whole country disappeared.”

An even deeper obsession prodded him once he returned to Chile after the plebiscite and 1990 election that dethroned dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet and elected President Patricio Aylwin. “You scratch the surface in Chile, and you find pain everywhere,” he pauses, then repeats and whispers “everywhere.”

“Simultaneously, you find that nobody is willing to talk about it. There was this sort of void. It’s as if the world isn’t complete until I’ve written down what I want. It’s a compulsion. When I write I become this terrible person . . . because until I finish, the world isn’t right, it’s out of juncture.”

Dorfman could be describing Sofia, a grandmother in the mythical village where “Widows” is set. The village men have vanished in the wake of a bloody civil war, but Sofia--a determined, mystical matriarch who befuddles both the peasant women and the occupying army--waits by the riverbank knowing that her father’s, and then, her husband’s bodies, will soon appear in the water.

Like Sofia, Dorfman, then writing in Amsterdam, knew that bodies would turn up sooner or later: “If you think about it, I was betting my literary life that bodies would appear in Chile. I bet that they were more alive than the men who disappeared them.”

Soon after, they actually did, in the town of Lonquen. For Dorfman, it was “a prophecy . . . of the poetic imagination.” For Sofia, it was her fulfilled prophecy that brought the village widows together, and into a face-off with an army wanting to bring technological progress to peasant culture.

Despite Dorfman’s links with theater--along with the Pinter book, there was a graduate thesis on Shakespeare, as well as strong support of Chile’s beleaguered political theater troupes--he had never considered “Widows” as a play. Not until friend and Los Angeles poet Deena Metzger brought the novel to the attention of Judith Rutherford James, then-director of the Taper’s film and television arm. “I found it one of the most beautiful and poignant books I had read,” Metzger explains, “but I also felt that it needed to be alive in front of people.” James passed it along to director Robert Egan, who helped arrange a Taper play commission for Dorfman.

About 25 drafts (“or maybe 26,” Dorfman estimates) later--interrupted by two novels (“Last Song of Manuel Sendero” and “Mascara”), some short stories (included in his collected “My House Is on Fire”), numerous essays, one play-in-the-works (“Reader”) and one that premiered July 11 at London’s Royal Court (“Death and the Maiden”)--”Widows” is ready, and Egan is still with the play, as director.

Dorfman, whose often elegant conversation is peppered with glib slam-dunks, remarks that “if the U.S. government had put as much effort into helping the Third World as Bob Egan put into this play, there would be no Third World poverty.”

With its compressed narrative and dramatic dialogues, “Widows” would seem to transpose easily to the stage. But a literal adaptation was, Dorfman found, a trap.

Take, for example, the book’s sly literary device, which was also part of a plan to sneak the novel in under Chile’s watchful censors. The reader was meant to think that this is the work of one Eric Lohmann, a Danish writer who scribbled this tale set in Greece just weeks before the Nazis arrested him. The book would come out in Spanish only after it first appeared in Danish and French (German novelist Heinrich Boll was recruited by Dorfman to confirm “Lohmann’s” authorship), and would hopefully reach Chile. A Spanish publisher, afraid of recrimination, pulled out at the last moment, thwarting the strategy. (It eventually surfaced in Spanish under Dorfman’s name.)

“In the (play’s) first version,” Dorfman recalls, “I had Lohmann as a character, writing about Greece, about the women. And it clocked in at about five hours.” (This material, though, isn’t lost: it’s included in “Reader,” which he hopes to stage at Los Angeles Theatre Center. A contract for its inclusion in the 1992 season, according to LATC, has yet to be signed.)

Dorfman then lays out a critical anatomy of his six years of labor. “It’s generally not good for the writer to adapt his or her own novel. In spite of my English, which is exceptional for a Latin American, the play’s reality is one that I live in Spanish. So some of my dialogue comes out Spanish-y. And then it’s dialogue that women peasants speak in English, when I barely know what these women speak in Spanish, not being a peasant.

“I’m dealing with an (American) audience which is barely aware of the play’s issues. The novel immediately grabs you, but the play needs some explaining. Yet you can’t make it expository.

“Finally, while it is about a certain place like Chile or El Salvador--or as we say in the program, ‘too many countries in the world’--it can happen anywhere. But to find the exact space, in a political play, where something is immediate yet imaginary, is a very difficult enterprise.”

Moreover, great political changes--beyond Chile’s recent bloodless return to democracy--affected Dorfman’s sense of the story: “With the transition around the world from dictatorships to democracies, the question arises: How do you move to more liberty without imperiling that liberty with the memories of what was done before? How do the tortured live with the torturers? This, in fact, is the theme of ‘Death and the Maiden,’ and it’s a central issue of our time.

“I also became more interested during the ‘80s in the survival of indigenous people, and the peasant cultures moving to the cities. At this moment, a tropical forest butterfly is disappearing forever, but languages are also disappearing, and these are the people who know what that butterfly meant.”

Almost beyond his own will, Dorfman found these ideas percolating into “Widows.”

And during these years, as Metzger describes it, there was an additional weight on Dorfman: “Ariel has carried Chile inside him. He suffered what the country suffered. (The Allende government) was the democratic road to socialism, so when the coup occurred, it was desperately disappointing. Yet like the Chileans, he carried incredible hope despite the despair.”

It’s an emotional stamina that flows through the family history. Dorfman’s Jewish grandparents fled to Argentina from the Eastern European pogroms before World War I. His professor father fled to the United States before Peron assumed power in Argentina (when the family returned to South America in the 1960s, they settled in Chile). Dorfman and his wife Maria Angelica found it sometimes difficult to explain to their sons, Rodrigo and Joaquin, why the family had to uproot. “I told them,” Dorfman says, “that I followed my father when I was young, that this runs in the family.”

Dorfman sometimes talks like a survivor who has lived to pass on a warning to the unsuspecting--meaning Americans: “People coming to ‘Widows’ shouldn’t think that they’re on some tourist trip to a Third World horror show. Americans should study dictatorships, because they’re not immune to it, believe me. I saw Chileans, some of the most democratic people in the world, becomes raging maniacs, denouncing and informing on neighbors.”

Hope for a Taper staging of “Widows,” though, seemed to wane last year. Tested on stage by Texas’ Hip Pocket Theatre and the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and adapted for a bilingual production at the San Diego Repertory Theatre (though never produced), the play seemed ready--to the playwright. The Taper demurred, requesting further rewrites. “There are limits to what I’m prepared to change,” Dorfman warned at the time. “There is a point where you can workshop a play to death.”

Now, Dorfman admits, “the Taper was right and I was wrong.” Egan enlisted Kushner--whose “Millennium Approaches,” the first half of his two-evening “Angels in America,” was staged last year at Taper, Too--as a kind of composite co-playwright/dramaturg. First doing his own top-to-bottom re-write, then visiting Dorfman for two marathon five-day sessions at his Durham, N.C. home, Kushner helped “explode the old version, and forced me to think from a new dramatic premise,” according to Dorfman.

Dorfman finds himself these days flying between London for fine-tuning of “Death and the Maiden,” and Los Angeles for “Widows” rehearsals, watching over the publication of his latest book, “Some Write to the Future” (on fellow Latin American writers), and weighing movie offers on the two plays. With tenure at Duke University’s international studies department, he finds the country whose government abetted the Pinochet nightmare years “the place where I feel most at home. I’m now spending less than half my time in Chile, where I’m a subversive gadfly, out on the margins--where any artist in a democracy should be. But I’m an expatriate, no longer in exile.”

But like a Dorfman novel or play, always ending on an open note teetering between life and death, Chile’s future remains in doubt. With Gen. Pinochet out of power but still wielding considerable influence in Chile, Dorfman wonders, “How strong is our democracy? Can it stand for people such as myself?

“We’ll find out.”