Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 81

The Sexual/Textual Infidelities
of Peter Sellars’ Don Giovanni
When faced with a new don Juan, critics may feel compelled to debate
whether or not a text has remained faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of its
antecedents. Fidelity, however, has never been one of don Juan’s stronger points.
In light of his own sexual promiscuity, the libertine would probably relish the
textual abandon of productions such as the Spanish Repertoire Company’s staging
of El burlador de Sevilla for the 1988 Chamizal Festival, an annual event, now in
its 26*^’ year, dedicated to the performance of Spanish Golden Age plays. A purist,
arguing that truly universal works are timeless and speak to all people in all ages,
may have had reservations about trying to make a classic ''Relevant” to a
contemporary audience. Nevertheless, even the most traditional viewer might allow
that having don Juan dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, running shoes, and sunglasses, and
Tisbea clad in a skin-tight spandex leotard, might facilitate entry into the Golden
Age classic for a twentieth-century audience-. Furthermore, tliis interpretation attests
to the malleability and endurance of a character that has engendered thousands of
plays, novels, poems, operas, and movies.- The director, Rene Buch, offers evidence
that, in keeping with his past transform ations, don Juan will continue to
metamorphose as he responds to the society that surrounds him.
Operatic director Peter Sellars takes this textual promiscuity one step
further by adding race and class to the issue of gender already embedded in the
don Juan story. Although all the elements of Mozart’s opera are immediate ly
recognizable, Sellars’s Don Giovanni (1991) examines social ills, racial tensions,
spiritual deprivations and economic imbalances of contemporary American society.
During the overture, the camera pans on littered New York City streets, empty
buildings, hungry dogs, frozen rats, the homeless huddled around a barrel fire,
graffiti-decorated walls, and, finally, the Faith Mission Church. This depressing
urban landscape establishes the setting for our hero’s escapades.
As the opera opens, don Giovanni, a black drug dealer and user from the
projects, rapes and beats donna Anna, while Leporello fantasizes about being a
rock star and laments the fact that he never gets a piece of the action. The two
leading male roles are played by identical black twins, Eugene and Herbert Perry.
Both dress in black leather jackets, jeans, and wear a gold-stud earring. They relate
to each other as gang leader and follower rather than noble master and peasant
servant. Although it is often difficult to distinguish between the two, Leporello
wears a red T-shirt with an “A” printed on it. Their identical appearance and similar
dress lend credibility to the seductions and fights in which the two substitute for