A Reworked ‘Don Juan’ Slouches Toward L.A. : Theater: Director Travis Preston uses a mix of the play and other texts to create a ‘meditation.’

A well-thumbed copy of a girlie magazine lies folded open at the top of a trash container outside the Mark Taper Forum’s Taper, Too space in Cahuenga Pass--it isn’t ignored. Someone points to it and asks director Travis Preston, “Is that yours?”

Preston’s habitual grin crinkles his face. “No,” he answers firmly. But his eyes are sparkling at the implication, which is very much to the point at the moment, as Preston heads into the final days of rehearsal for Tuesday’s opening of his version of Moliere’s “Don Juan.”

This “Don Juan” bears little resemblance to Moliere’s play, however. It’s part Simone de Beauvoir, part 15th-Century philosopher Blaise Pascal, part Preston and his longtime dramaturg and collaborator Royston Coppenger, and part his company of six actors.

Preston’s Don Juan would not find the treasures he sought in that discarded magazine. The search is deeper, and richer in its discoveries, than that.

“We know that in the structure of Moliere’s play Don Juan is damned,” says Preston, “but it’s difficult to say, with a contemporary context, or even in the context of Moliere’s time, what that damnation meant.” The play became for Preston “a mode of entry into certain kinds of issues--issues of identity. Sexual politics was involved with that, though not from a doctrinaire standpoint, but rather from the sense of eroticism and erotic mystery.”

That realization led him to the other texts that have become a part of the Preston “Don Juan,” which he says can’t properly be called a production of Moliere’s play. “I call it a meditation,” he explains, “taking the play and the idea of Don Juan and meditating on the possible ramifications of that character for today. The play is cast with five women and one man, the women taking all the other roles, aside from Don Juan. He’s very soundly in a kind of feminine universe.”

A section of De Beauvoir’s “Second Sex” provided “lyrical passages that are related to the coming of age of a young woman,” which Preston uses to cast “the idea of the character and his actions, in a different framework.”

A contemporary of Moliere’s, Pascal provided some critical insights for Preston.

“I began to think of Don Juan almost as a speculative philosopher, in a sense,” he said. “He was, in many respects, on a quest related to the nature of identity itself. My main impulse was never to try to explain Don Juan, but to use the material to reveal a kind of mystery of human identity.

“I don’t see this as a piece about a man,” he continued. “I see it as a piece about this erotic universe and, in a sense, the mystery of existence, part of that mystery having to do with relations between men and women, things that have stumbled us all for centuries. It’s kind of an expression of the glory of the mystery--and I am not myself a religious person--but a revelation of mysteries that are present and exist and that will probably remain impenetrable no matter how advanced we become.”

Preston thinks of his “Don Juan” meditation in terms of “emotional landscapes that are constructed with a texture created by the actors--very personal ones--that have to do with gesture, juxtaposed with a piece of music, and then juxtaposed with a text, each left autonomous, but each justifying the other.”

He is now moving into an area that fascinates him, the process of acting itself, about which he has some intriguing notions. He would like more opportunities “to investigate more closely these things that are being intimated in the work of the actor. My particular interest has to do with the question of what is essential, what is meaningful for us now, as a people, as expression on a stage. What does that mean in terms of the actor?

“The corollary I found was silent movies, early silent films. It’s very rare that you find the kind of acting that reaches the level of beauty that you experience in an early silent film, like ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc,’ the lyricism of the human body, things we might call choreographic, the emotion that comes through gesture.”

A glimpse of a Preston rehearsal is as illuminating as his own explanations. Even on an almost bare stage, the fluidity of movement and gesture guides the eye across his “landscape” as the ear is led through the text.

Preston’s landscapes have been seen around the world, in many forms. He has directed plenty of theater, from the world premiere of Ted Tally’s “Terra Nova” at the Yale Rep to the premiere of Brecht’s “Berlin Requiem” at American Repertory Theater.

He has staged plays in Poland, Denmark, Norway and England. Next, he returns to the University of Michigan--where he staged the operas “Don Pasquale” and “Falstaff”--to direct Mozart’s musical version of the Don Juan legend, “Don Giovanni.” His updated film version of “Crime and Punishment,” called “Astonished” and set in Manhattan’s Lower Eastside, was recently completed. At the moment, though, all his thoughts are on “Don Juan.”

The laughter over the magazine in the trash can is forgotten as Preston begins to lose himself once more in the collaborative rehearsal process that is leading up to Tuesday’s opening. Maybe not totally forgotten. “Don Juan may be closer to all of us than we might think,” he said with his impish grin.

“It was easy for me to say, ‘Oh, no, he’s not like me.’ But I think, perhaps, there are things present here that are necessary for me to reflect on, in the nature of human responsibility, the beauty of intimacy and the attractions that are attendant to it.”