WHAT: Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern presents Ariel Dorfman's "Picasso's Closet" directed by Jay O'Berski.

WHEN: 7 p.m. today, Friday and Nov. 15; 2 p.m. Saturday. Dorfman will speak about his play after today's performance.

WHERE: The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham.

TICKETS: $5 at the Duke Box Office (919-684-4444); www.tickets.duke.edu or at the museum on the day of the show. Proceeds benefit three local organizations that support literacy and human rights.

By SUSAN BROILI

Special to The Herald-Sun

DURHAM -- Ariel Dorfman's own experiences inform the atmosphere of paranoia that permeates his play, "Picasso's Closet."

In the play, Picasso becomes unusually taciturn and withdraws into his studio because he doesn't know whom to trust in Paris during the German occupation (1940-1944). It doesn't help that one of the characters, German Army Capt. Albert Lucht, haunts the artist.

The Nasher Museum-commissioned production of the play opens today at the museum.

"As a child, I was full of foreboding already," Dorfman said in a recent interview on Duke University's West Campus. At that time, the Dorfmans lived in Queens, N.Y., where his father had settled the family after fleeing Argentina's dictatorship. But when U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy targeted Dorfman's father, a left-wing radical and former communist, his father had to leave his high-level United Nations post in New York in 1954 and flee once again with his family, this time to Chile.

"Afterwards, I lived with real persecution, real evil and real fear under the [Gen. Augusto] Pinochet dictatorship," Dorfman said. "Real friends died, were tortured and exiled. I lived with the possibility that this could happen to me."

During the 1973 coup in which Pinochet's forces ousted President Salvador Allende, the writer barely escaped with his life thanks mainly to an Allende official, who, years later, told him he had helped him because someone had to tell the story, Dorfman relates in his memoir, "Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey."

So, like Picasso, the writer knows something about survivor's guilt. "He's in an impossible situation because nothing he does is going to finally get rid of the guilt for not doing enough," Dorfman said.

In the play, Picasso faces criticism for not coming forward to help others -- particularly his old friend, poet Max Jacob, sent by the Germans to a concentration camp where he died. But Dorfman also shares that Picasso did send money to artists in danger. Picasso remains enigmatic to other characters in the play and to the audience as well so that no one can penetrate his secrets, his "closet," Dorfman has said. "He had to be very careful not to confront the wrath of occupiers," the playwright said.

In his Paris studio, Picasso could hear gunshots from just a block away where people were killed," Dorfman said.

"He chose life. Picasso is the epitome of life. ... He had an almost biological urge to create," the playwright added.

To this day, Dorfman experiences what he calls "waking nightmares." Even in Durham where he lives and teaches at Duke University, he feels "panicky" when certain things happen, especially when stopped by police, he said. "A uniform brings up automatically the reaction that anything can happen next. Your psyche changes," he said of living under a dictatorship.

He uses a thriller format to create tension -- something especially difficult as he makes sure the audience knows that Picasso did not actually die until 1973 at age 91 even though Lucht claims to have killed the artist in 1944. The play embodies two mysteries -- how will Lucht accomplish this impossible murder and how will the playwright wriggle out of these contradictions, Dorfman said.

The playwright also challenged himself and the audience by choosing to pay homage to Picasso's art by creating a play that, like the art, presents conflicting perspectives, superimposes time and place and breaks down identities.

Picasso saw art as a wager against death. "He was constantly assaulted and challenged by death," the playwright said. As a writer, Dorfman said he has dedicated his life to making the dead speak, to asking himself the question, "Where are the silent of history?"

Dorfman sees art as "a life-giving force, our daily stab at redemption," he has said.

For Jay O'Berski, who directs this production of the play, both Picasso and Dorfman share a quality of integrity in their art. "To me, it's all about integrity. How do you not sell out?" O'Berski said in a recent interview.