Those expecting a “Don Juan” celebrating the antics of a serial seducer might be better off seeing the movie “Casanova.” The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s impudent and cerebral staging of Moliere’s most censored play concentrates on the amatory legend’s anarchic mind, and the character is more of a rampant social critic than an affront to decent women everywhere.
Director Stephen Wadsworth penned a new, brashly conversational adaptation-translation of the 1665 comedy, using an edition of the play originally published in Amsterdam after Moliere’s death. French and English versions of “Don Juan” were so heavily censored and watered down that the original barbed social commentary largely had been lost. Mr. Wadsworth looked to the Dutch edition for indications of where and how the text was altered.
For the Shakespeare Theatre Company production, Mr. Wadsworth floridly attempts to recapture the anxious bluster of that opening night in Paris on Feb. 15, 1665, when Moliere’s company performed “Don Juan” before King Louis XIV, the first and only time the play was performed as written. The scandal and hasty suppression of “Don Juan” were even greater than the controversy that had greeted the premiere of “Tartuffe” the year before.
It was not the sex that rankled the 17th-century court. No one could get too hot and bothered over the portrayal of the rakish nobleman Don Juan (Jeremy Webb) flitting from one “love” to another, conquests that included Dona Elvira (Francesca Faridany), a former nun, a peasant girl (Laura Heisler), and a bourgeois lady (Laura Kenny).
No, it was Don Juan’s libertine mind — freely expounding on the hypocrisy of the age and religious superstition — that flipped everyone’s periwigs. Freethinking, not free love, is what got Moliere into such trouble. “These days, hypocrisy is the most fashionable vice of all,” Don Juan says.
Mr. Wadsworth and company go to great lengths — perhaps too far — trying to convey what it was like to perform the play in 1665, starting with a precious and winking rhymed prologue. Although ably delivered by Laurence O’Dwyer, you wonder if it serves any purpose but academic showing off. And the first couple times the cast looks out into the audience and cries “Long live the king!” with a Gallic sneer, it is funny, but the joke quickly wears thin.
Far more entertaining is Don Juan, who elegantly moves from hilariously impassioned wooing to fierce diatribes on religion and the importance of logical thinking without ruffling his frilly cuffs. Mr. Webb is devilishly good as the caddish hero, so true to the giddy perversity of the character that when he is condemned to hell at the end of the play, you don’t feel sorry for him but applaud his bravado to the end.
Equally charismatic is his put-upon servant Sganarelle (Michael Milligan), who is as devoted to money as his master is to sexual conquest. Sganarelle’s smidgen of conscience and his scathing two-faced commentary give the play a slippery moral center. Yet his constant carping about money gets tiresome, too, and his lament (“My wages! My wages!”) while watching Don Juan descend into damnation ends the play on a sour, wearying note.
Miss Faridany is luminous as Dona Elvira, moving from vengeful spurned love to radiance in her capacity for forgiveness. Burton Curtis makes a splendid buffoon as Pierrot, a foulmouthed peasant who rails against Don Juan making moves on his fiancee, Charlotte.
The staging is beautiful, with the flat painted backdrops, footlights and scenery moving on ropes and pulleys giving an air of lavish artificiality. Set designer Kevin Rupnik, aided by costumer Anna R. Oliver, pulls off an astonishing feat in the rendering of the living Statue (Gilbert Cruz), which is so eerie it almost scares you into repentance the same way it affects Don Juan.
The opulence continues in Miss Oliver’s costumes, particularly in Don Juan’s preening outfits, rendered in peacock purples and blues, and in Joan Arhelger’s lighting, which takes on the dramatic shadows and glints of a Caravaggio painting in the second act.
“Don Juan” dwells on the price of excess — whether it is in the realm of piety or pleasure. Mr. Wadsworth’s histrionic production emphasizes these extremes and ends up compromising the subtlety and charm of Moliere’s play.
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WHAT: “Don Juan” by Moliere
WHERE: Shakespeare Theatre Company, 450 Seventh St. NW
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Through March 19.
TICKETS: $14.25 to $71.25
PHONE: 202/547-1122
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