It’s a humorous feeling and never all the time a welcome one when a play reaches out throughout the centuries and punches you within the throat. This occurs towards the tip of “Dom Juan,” Ashley Tata’s gender-swapped manufacturing of Molière’s 1665 tragicomedy at Bard’s SummerScape competition.
Dom Juan (Amelia Workman), libertine extraordinaire, has lastly reformed. Or has she? Seems, her piety is only a pose. “In right now’s world the best position you possibly can play is that of the morally upright individual,” Dom Juan explains to her long-suffering, devious servant Sganarelle (Zuzanna Szadkowski). “The career of hypocrite has numerous perks.”
Her cynical avowal speaks — loudly — of politics right now. However wait. It will get worse. This identical speech appears to prefigure web trolling (“hypocrites create a cabal of the like-minded, in the event you assault one, all of them activate you”) and the way in which that so-called cancel tradition seldom cancels anybody in energy (“they simply bow their heads, sigh contritely, roll their eyes, and everybody forgives them”). Strains like these may counsel savvy interpolations by the authors of this new translation: Gideon Lester, the inventive director of the Fisher Heart at Bard, and Sylvaine Guyot. However no, they’re devoted renditions of the Seventeenth-century authentic. The language has barely been up to date.
Nice playwrights typically have themes that they return to, time and again. Molière’s is hypocrisy. Which ought to make Dom Juan, a freethinker who spends many of the play discarding social conference as casually as you or I would wad a Kleenex, a hero. Or as on this manufacturing, a heroine. Positive, Dom Juan stays a seducer. However a girl doing what she desires together with her physique? Sounds good!
Dom Juan’s actuality is extra difficult — for Molière and for Tata, too. Right here is how Sganarelle describes her boss: “The best scoundrel who ever walked the earth, a fury, a canine, a satan, a rat, a blasphemer who doesn’t consider in heaven or hell or werewolves or something.” Which doesn’t sound as nice.
“Dom Juan” asks questions — perennial ones — about what a person owes the neighborhood and what she owes herself. As seductive as it’s to see a girl resist subjugation, we at the moment are years faraway from #girlboss slogans, which is to say that the concept of freedom within the absence of ethics or solidarity has misplaced its shimmer. And a specific lesson of the pandemic has been how simply freedom will be weaponized, the way it could make different individuals much less free.
Tata’s busy, stressed manufacturing introduces these problems, although it generally forgets them amid the commotion of the sock puppet, the rock band, the swordplay, the lace cuffs, the haze and a few very cool visible and sonic results. (Afsoon Pajoufar designed the set, with lighting by Cha See, video design by Lisa Renkel and sound design by Chad Raines.) I laughed out loud when the present’s curtain — a tapestry of a pastoral scene — appeared to shrivel and burn. As a result of what enjoyable! However for a very long time within the center, the play goes nowhere, breathlessly, and pleasure palls earlier than Dom Juan’s comeuppance arrives.
As Lester and Guyot have revered Molière’s authentic textual content, the gender-swap hardly ever feels full. A lady may by no means have behaved this fashion in Molière’s day. She may barely behave this fashion now. Nonetheless, the swashbuckling position stays a showcase for Workman, an actress of each swagger and metal. Her Dom Juan is groovy, rowdy, but in addition adamantine, so unmoved by others that she is half-statue already. The supporting forged doesn’t all the time equal her, however Jordan Bellow provides beautiful bodily comedy as Dom Juan’s abandoned husband, Elver, and Szadkowski’s Sganarelle has some advantageous unruly moments.
Regardless of its adornments and seductions, the play is bitter at its coronary heart. Make investments too deeply in Dom Juan’s liberation and even in her punishment and the ending will depart a foul style. The one different is to not care — to lose your self as a substitute within the manufacturing’s delights, which isn’t a specific chore on a sun-drenched afternoon.
In any other case, you may end up pondering, uneasily, of the play’s prescient ethical, spoken by Sganarelle: “To have energy and a depraved soul — that’s a horrible factor.”
Dom Juan
By July 17 on the Fisher Heart LUMA Theater; fishercenter.bard.edu. Working time: 2 hours half-hour.
