The Alienated Seducer

Where stands Don Juan in the sexual revolution? Like Faust, he is one of the archetypes of Western culture --snapping his fingers at human decency and God's law, acting out man's secret fantasy of seduction as a way of life. Punishment was necessary, of course; hell ultimately yawns for him in many of the legend's countless versions, with a macabre assist from a stone statue stamping after him for vengeance. A sense of wickedness, though, depends on an accepted set of rules and values. In the permissive, post-Christian world, the idea of seduction as sin is definitely dated.

Thus, it is all the more creditable that Director Robert Brustein and the Yale Repertory Theater have produced a version of Moliere's Don Juan that is significant to a contemporary audience. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, the prototypical Don Juan was proposed in legend as the enemy of God, and Translator Kenneth Cavender uses this phrase as the play's subtitle, instead of Moliere's "The Feast of the Statue." Brustein goes further, presenting the Don as not merely a sex-obsessed boudoir-supremacist womanizing his way to damnation, but as a supranatural embodiment of alienated man, offered up as an atoning sacrifice. This quasi-religious element is pointed up by a Prologue-Epilogue that frames Moliere's play--a blackish Mass wherein sinister, cowled figures sacrifice a goat. The animal's corpse on the altar diminishes by bloody stages throughout the action, as Don Juan moves on to his own final holocaust in a cataclysm of light and,, sound.

Chillingly Sexless. The play also is vivified by the extraordinary performance in the title role of Alvin Epstein, one of the Yale Repertory directors. He hates. His eyes glitter with refrigerated rage at everyone, including himself. In an elegant, Hamletesque black doublet, his body is rigid with a tension that can never find release--even in the contemptuous dalliances that occupy his time. He talks constantly of his freedom, but he is incapable of breaking through into the real, accepting freedom of love. His only power is to destroy whatever he can touch--the innocent troth of a country girl, his own wife's selfless devotion, his father's love, a servant's self-respect. His obsessive sexuality is chillingly sexless.

The Yale Repertory's theater was once a church, and Brustein has exploited its dark interior to augment the play's supernatural dimension--even to the otiose point of having important speeches delivered from the pulpit. The electronic sound effects that thump and mutter portentously reflect not so much Newness as good, old gothic hokum. But these mechanical excesses hardly detract from a vibrant updating of the quintessential symbol of love 'em and leave 'em. The presentation deserves not to be left in New Haven.

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