In less accomplished hands, Don Juan Giovanni might seem a stunt. There are times when, like the Plymouth, it spins its wheels, usually when Serrand’s Don Juan stops the action to pose a question like “How do we come to be of this world?” Molière’s play can be rendered effectively Beckettian, as was proved by Jacques Cartier’s 1988 staging for the Huntington Theatre Company. (Indeed, there are some Waiting for Godot–like moments for Epp’s Sganarelle and Greenwald’s Leporello, as they settle into asexual couplehood or mime the setting of Don Juan’s table in anticipation of his supernatural dinner guest.) But for all its shunning of the unities, Molière’s play, even when peppered with contemporary crudity, can seem formal and talky, its heretical assertions of freedom and free will irrelevant in DJG’s road-movie landscape. Moreover, the little literary lazzi engaged in by Don Juan and Sganarelle — everything from Byron and Tennessee Williams to OfMice and Men is invoked — don’t all work. But Epp makes a bravura aria for himself of a speech in which, masquerading as a pigtailed nurse, he frets over the many disguises he might have chosen but for whom they might offend, concluding, “I thought I might just be George Bush, but that would be offensive to everyone. Even me.”
It’s as if Epp and Serrand were more captivated by Molière (their half of the evening, after all) when the soul of the performance is the cleverly inserted Mozart: heart to the French playwright’s head. But thanks to both the beauty of the music and the tenderness of the acting, particularly by the regal Peden as a pregnant Elvire trying to coax Don Juan back not to bed but to God, the theater piece ends gracefully, its saddened if unrepentant pair going down enfolded in the women’s skirts as the Commendatore, now Don Juan’s dead father, issues his ominous basso invitation to dinner. Hell hath no fury like — so why bother with the licking flames?
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, Entertainment, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George W. Bush, Performing Arts, Don Juan, Theater, Theatrical Plays, Huntington Theatre Company, Daniel Stepner, Laura Jeppesen, Less
