Don Juan by Richard Foreman (review)

styles in production DON JUAN Directed by Richard Foreman New York Shakespeare Festival Gerald Rabkin In his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre of the 1970s, Richard Foreman created a microcosm in which words were treacherous. They formed declarative sentences which in themselves made logical sense: they described, informed , generalized, cautioned, exhorted-but they did not combine to create the verbal construcf we call a "play." Each sentence-occasionally each word-existed not in relationship to conventional linguistic meaning, but as one movement in the shifting intersections of lines of theatrical force which formed alogical theatrical images composed as much for the eye as the ear. "Listening and looking," he affirmed in Lines of Vision, "become interchangeable." After the closing of his theatre in 1979, Foreman did not abandon his re-vision , but has shown himself increasingly willing to focus it on verbal texts other than those he has himself created. In 1977, at the behest of Joe Papp, he had directed a Lincoln Center production of Threepenny Opera which, though unconventional, hewed to the letter of Brecht and Weill, but it seemed a deflection of his theatrical energies which were still concentrated then in his theatre on lower Broadway. Now he is no longer as firmly wedded to the role which accorded him prominence in the seventies-the playwright, director, designer, impresario who distills into himself all specialized theatrical functions. His recent work on view in New York-productions of Botho Strauss' Three Acts of Recognition and Moliere's Don Juan-reveal his assumption of a more traditional directorial role, as interpreter of contemporary and classic dramatic texts. Traditional but with a difference. Foreman remains committed to the ideas which inform his Ontological-Hysteric work. Language is still treacherous -indeed, even more so when it is encrusted with the sedimentation of history. Remember, of all American theatre experimentalists, Foreman is the one most consciously indebted to new European-structuralist and post-structuralist-modes of discourse. With Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, et al. he rejects the realist or authoritarian heresy that the critic (or director) can make definitive contact with some ultimate, residual meaning when, in reality, he is simply transcribing a code-or a series of interlocking codes 67 which can be deciphered but never fully recovered. In his production notes for the Guthrie Theatre Don Juan-which, with some revision and recasting was essentially the production transferred to the Delacorte this past summer -Foreman affirms his discipleship: "Following the lead of contemporary French theorists, I find it most productive and illuminating to regard the written text of the playwright as the 'deposit,' the 'tracings' of what obsessed him as an individual." So the theatrical problems that Foreman-the-interpreter must confront are not simpler but more complex than those faced by Foreman-the-auteur. In his Ontological-Hysteric work, the "intertextuality" confronted is contemporary , rooted in his singular consciousness-an intertextuality of linguistic and gestural discourse rooted (in the language of contemporary French theory) in a decentered present. Interpreting Strauss obviously presents less problems in this regard than pursuing Moliere through the maze of history ; Foreman's sensibility is clearly attuned to the Brechtian-influenced texts of the contemporary German theatre (his own debt to Brecht is profound ). But Moliere's Don Juan? An acknowledged "classic" text? If the authority of a univocal reading (assumed whenever it is demanded that the text speak for itself) is rejected, how is the director to physicalize the intertextuality of past and present? How can the "tracings" and "deposits" of the past be best uncovered? As Elinor Fuchs pointed out in the Village Voice, it is a problem Foreman shares with a generation of "post-modern" directors-Lee Breuer, Joseph Chaikin, Andre Serban-as they increasingly accept the challenge of confronting "classic" texts. Aesthetic problems are compounded by production exigencies. Obviously, a performance in the Delacorte's sylvan setting breeds traditional theatrical expectations. Though it is doubtlessly courageous of Joe Papp to challenge his summer audience's orthodoxies with radical productions by such as Foreman and Breuer (whose pop Tempest summer before last infuriated many), we can assume that he would not assent to a wholesale "deconstruction " of the literary text-in the manner, say, of...