THEATER REVIEW : Message Lost on a ‘Maiden’ in Distress : Ariel Dorfman’s play of ideas gets smothered beneath a plodding plot line, drab dialogue and a morass of melodrama.

Chilean author Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” which in 1992 had the odd distinction of being contemporary Broadway’s first play about torture, tells a story that needs to be heard.

The subject is the abuse of power, and specifically the emotional fallout faced by women and men who live in a place where there’s recently been a brutal regime. Like Chile. Or El Salvador. Or South Africa.

It’s a play you want to like--if only because it says attention must be paid to the intertwinings of personal and political lives and the ways in which a nation’s collective traumas play out, over and over again, between the sheets and over the morning java.

But no matter how ethically commendable the topic, nor how lofty the intent, pedestrian dramaturgy will kill any play. And “Death and the Maiden,” alas, is a clunker.

Set in what Dorfman terms “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,” it’s the story of Paulina Salas (Wanda De Jesus), a woman who suddenly finds herself facing the man she believes tortured and raped her 15 years ago.

When Salas’ human-rights lawyer husband Gerardo (Jimmy Smits) gets a flat tire on the road one night, he invites the man who stopped to help him, Dr. Miranda (Tomas Milian), over to the couple’s posh beach house for a drink. Thinking she recognizes Dr. Miranda’s voice, Paulina decides to put him on trial in her home--at gunpoint. She wants a confession, and catharsis.

Much of the fault here lies not with director Robert Egan and his stars--who have their moments, De Jesus more than the others--but with Dorfman’s drama, which shows every one of its crudely sewn seams.

A play of ideas gets smothered here beneath a morass of melodrama. Dorfman dredges up all the creaky devices of the 19th-Century stage: the stranded traveler, the chance meeting, the overheard conversation, the binding and gagging of the stranger.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, if the melodramatics were a pretext for a play of language or philosophies. But these mechanisms don’t so much set up the clash of ideologies as they drown it out, so loud is the creaking of the plot.

What you get is about 100 minutes of setup and only 20 minutes of payoff. By the time the play works its way to its thematic core--the relative claims of vengeance, justice and the need to get on with life--it’s almost over.

*

Dorfman flings the audience back and forth every half-scene or so in these Perils of Paulina. First you think the doctor is the guy who tortured her, then you think he’s probably not. One minute you figure she’ll pull the trigger, the next you’re sure she won’t. And so it goes.

Almost as damaging as the contrivances is the frequently hokey dialogue. “And why does it always have to be people like me who have to sacrifice,” asks Paulina, “why always me who has to bite her tongue, why?” Why indeed?

Paulina is the plum role here--the Sarah Bernhardt/Eleonora Duse part--and De Jesus can turn on the passion. Two of her monologues in particular--including one where she recounts her torture to the strains of the titular Schubert quartet--achieve the poignancy the rest of this evening merely slouches toward.

De Jesus doesn’t seem to have much range, though, but that’s probably Dorfman’s fault as well. After all, what’s a diva to do when she has to show up in Act I, Scene 1 waving a gun? Try to build an arc after an intro like that. There’s just nowhere to go.

Smits and De Jesus have one emotionally juicy scene in which they try to grapple with their past. Yet aside from this bit and the final scene--which takes place months after the beach house meeting, at a concert--the former “L.A. Law” star doesn’t show many layers to his character’s psyche. Granted, he’s playing a guy who shuts out what bugs him. But as Anthony Hopkins, for one, as amply demonstrated, there’s more to playing uptight than simply behaving stiffly.

Milian spends a good deal of stage time bound and gagged--on Yael Pardess’ elegantly upper-bourgeois living room set--and can offer up only the occasional emu bray during these segments. Otherwise, he’s amusing, if not menacing. But he really should be both.

Like Dorfman, director Egan is tuned into both the personal and political passions at work here. His staging gets some steam going in the monologues and more intimate moments, but falls flat in the group scenes.

Still, while it isn’t Egan’s strongest outing, the major culprit is the text. Though the playwright’s goals are beyond reproach, Dorfman threatens to become the Dion Boucicault of the Amnesty International age.

* “Death and the Maiden,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. , Los Angeles. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays & Sundays, 2:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends March 13. $22.-$35. (213) 365-3500, Running time: 2 hours. Wanda De Jesus: Paulina

Jimmy Smits: Gerardo

Tomas Milian: Roberto

Marcelo Tubert: Gerardo’s friend

A Mark Taper Forum production. Written by Ariel Dorfman. Directed by Robert Egan. Set by Yael Pardess. Costumes Todd Roehrman. Music Karl Fredrik Lundeberg. Lights Martin Aronstein. Sound Jon Gottlieb.