STAGE REVIEW : ‘Don Juan’ Outfoxes Audience

Visually, it is somber and mysterious. Aurally, it whispers more than it speaks. But, for all its dreaminess, “Don Juan: A Meditation” at Taper, Too, which begins with striking mood images, ends up 80 minutes later as an intellectual exercise more likely to have satisfied its creators than its audiences. What it offers in levels of profound thought cannot fully be assimilated at one sitting. In that sense, theater--a medium of impression and feeling--is the inappropriate messenger.

The piece is the brainchild of director Travis Preston and his dramaturge, Royston Coppenger. If there is any connection to the Moliere “Don Juan,” it is merely as a launching pad. This “Meditation” owes as much--or rather as little--to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” and considerably more to the writings of Blaise Pascal and to Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering feminist manifesto, “The Second Sex.” It is a philosophical collage. A game that moves like a lost submarine, tapping its anxious messages in Morse code.

Mind you, those messages can be also poetic and seductive. In Mark Wedland’s design at Taper, Too, they are communicated with the help of a roving full-length mirror, the five women who move it around, write on it, draw on it, drape themselves on it--and a stage mostly plunged in darkness, caressed by thin slivers of light that widen into wedges and, just as quickly, shrink back into blackness. (Richard Hoyes did the tricky lighting scheme.)

The women--Marissa Chibas, Diane Defoe, Elina Lowensohn, Tamlyn Tomita, Nancy Allison Wolfe--are emblematic. Dressed in identical shifts, they are Woman. They speak as themselves or as others, sometimes taking on male personas (such as Don Juan’s acolyte Sganarelle). They are a physical remonstrance--a term that comes up at least twice in the text.

But the words that stay with us most, because they are so simple and so startling, are Pascal’s. Paraphrased and short-circuited, they tell us that man, who is born for thought and is never without it, hungers at his peril after excitement and action. His dominant passions are love and ambition, which do not co-exist well. Paradoxically, the more mind we have, the greater the passions, since passions, though belonging to the body, are occasioned by the mind.

From the provocative planting of this notion, we dive into combinations of text and imagery that rely heavily on the symbols and affectations of the stage to explore it. That is where Preston is at his best. For a while. His Don Juan (an aptly vain yet seductive John Gould Rubin) is an honest fellow who embraces his passions without apology and holds philosophical discourses with Sganarelle, with his conquered Charlotta, with the evangelical Elvira, and not least with himself in the mirror.

But the pace of this exploration is at all times too measured, not to say slow, supported by snatches of music or sound (designer Nathan Birnbaum weaves his magic again) and moving with a kind of reverence that ultimately becomes ingrown. We are held in a forced trance rather than mesmerized by what unfolds. The stylization is extreme, but in the long run so unvarying that it erodes some of its erotic mystery and makes it hard to stay with its cogitations.

Perhaps Preston was simply too close, too familiar with or enamored of the material to remember that an audience only has a single crack at it and that it needs all the help it can get.

What the piece could use is the fiery Moliere ending that it so carefully chooses instead to avoid. There is no statue of the commander here, no galvanic handshake of stone, no voice of righteousness, no explosive descent into hell, no terror. It finishes much as it began: with laconic words. It screams for a bang, but delivers a whimper. For a “Meditation” otherwise loaded to the gills with emblems, it’s a mystifying choice. But a choice, nonetheless.

‘Don Juan: A Meditation’

John Gould Rubin: Don Juan

Marissa Chibas, Diane Defoe, Elina Lowensohn, Tamlyn Tomita, Nancy Allison Wolfe: Ensemble

A Taper, Too presentation of a collage based on the works of Moliere, Simone de Beauvoir, Blaise Pascal and others. Director Travis Preston. Dramaturge Royston Coppenger. Sets and costumes Mark Wendland. Lights Richard Hoyes. Sound Nathan Birnbaum. Stage manager Jill Ragaway. Production assistant Susan Walsh.