Don Juan in Chicago

Sex makes people do funny things. The Clockwork Theater’s production of David Ives’ Don Juan in Chicago pokes fun at the lengths people will go to in order to have sex, avoid it, or have it with that special someone (whether or not he or she shares the sentiment).

Reviewed by Ilena George

Vascillating erratically between comedy and drama, damnation and redemption, The Clockwork Theater's Don Juan in Chicago re-imagines the story of legendary lothario Don Juan, who makes a deal with the devil: immortality in exchange for the successful seduction of a different woman each night. The trouble is he’s not a particularly smooth operator and, like its protagonist, the production needs to add a little grease to its wheels.

With its reliance on one-liners and fast-paced comedy sequences, Don Juan in Chicago plays out with the timing of a sitcom. Kooky and heavy-handed light and sound tricks—lighting and thunder as well as cartoonish announcements of the Devil’s arrival—underscore the play’s dark-humored though light-hearted moments. Ives’ deft rhyming couplets and overblown Shakespearean ending, with parents reuniting with long-lost children and true love ruling the day, highlights the fact that the play works best when it’s not taking itself too seriously. Consequentially, its serious moments feel leaden and lifeless. In addition, Mike Cinquino as Don Juan morosely sleepwalks through all but the beginning of the play, leaving the heavy lifting to the non-titular characters, who are more than capable of carrying the action, particularly Doug Nyman as Don Juan’s long-suffering servant Leporello and Stephen Balantzian as Mephistopheles.

Despite an ending that tries to tack on a much happier (and loftier) twist on what had otherwise been fairly dark in subject matter and fairly light in tone, the play partially redeems itself with its creative series of dirty jokes. After all, even the devil enjoys a good laugh.

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Don Juan in Chicago by David Ives
Directed by Owen M. Smith
Kirk Theater at Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street
May 26th-June 9th
Tuesday-Friday at 8pm, Saturdays at 2:00 and 8:00, Sundays at 3:00
Tickets: 212-279-4200

Phallacy

As the title’s pun suggests, Phallacy amounts to a 90-minute penis joke. The fact that the joke is told by Carl Djerassi, inventor of oral contraceptives and one of the world’s leading chemists, makes it funnier, but does not fully redeem this exhibition of puerile professional one-upmanship couched in a lecture.

Reviewed by Ilena George

In Djerassi’s Phallacy, art and science butt heads, step on one another’s toes and refuse to see eye-to-eye. Based on a real-life incident, an art historian and her assistant struggle against a chemist and his assistant to get to the truth behind a sculpture assumed to belong to Roman antiquity and later proven to be a Renaissance copy of an ancient sculpture. The accomplished ensemble cast makes their two-dimensional characters likeable but the play's flaw lies in its story: Djerassi mines what is possibly the least compelling aspect of the statue’s story in what becomes a childish and dull debate of the merits of art history versus those of chemistry through a technologically sophisticated prank war.

From the staging to the plot, the play hangs on its characters’ unwillingness to see what is directly in front of them. Dr. Regina Leitner-Opfermann (Lisa Harrow), director of the antiquities division of Austria’s premiere art museum, has literally written the book on a sculpture of a young man she has long attributed to the Roman period. When challenged by scientific evidence presented by chemist Dr. Rex Stolzfuss (Simon Jones) about the sculpture’s anachronistic elemental composition—too few trace elements in the bronze for the technology of the Roman period—Dr. Leitner-Opfermann shrilly refuses to acknowledge Dr. Stolzfuss’ research, just as she chooses to ignore some of her own research that casts doubt on what she chooses to believe about the statue. In a fit of pique, during which Jones practically rolls his eyes at her and winks at us, she throws Stolzfuss out of her office, sparking a race between the two sides, who share the stage but not a common purpose, to see who will be the first to publish conclusive proof as to the statue’s true origin.

Underlying this clash is an ill-fated love story. Dr. Leitner-Opfermann’s young colleague Emma (Carrie Heitman) and Stolzfuss’s assistant Otto (Vince Nappo) are in a secret and somewhat contrived relationship. Their relationship becomes a pawn in the power play between the two professional heavyweights as Dr. Stolzfuss uses information Otto gleaned from Emma to trick Dr. Leitner-Opfermann with pieces replicating her beloved statue, with one small but important adjustment Dr. Stolzfuss knew Dr. Leitner-Opfermann would overlook: the angle of the statue’s penis.

The human element gets lost quickly in this world where professional achievement means everything. Nappo and Heitman, while their performances are solid, lack real chemistry and their pairing seems doomed from the outset. Dr. Leitner-Opfermann’s marriage also failed and she develops a sensual but asexual relationship to the statue; she is intensely aware of each of the statue’s parts but pointedly skipping over any mention of his reproductive organs. Harrow shines in her description of the statue and her level of attention to its details; she conveys a wistful longing both for the object and for what she has had to sacrifice in pursuing it.

But the play’s real emotional core remains lodged in dimly lit flashbacks to an interaction between a soldier and a veiled woman, whose “costumes” are cleverly projected onto Nappo and Harrow. The soldier tells us he is Don Juan of Austria (bastard son of Hapsburg King Charles V and brother of Philip II) and the Austrian villager who hides behind a veil reveals her identity as Don Juan’s mother. Along with their identities, the pair reveal to us the statue’s true origins, an issue the present-day characters will continue to squabble over until the last possible moment.

Any elementary school student could have stepped in and offered these characters a lecture on compromise. The play flirts briefly with the idea that there is room for art in science, science in art, a personal life in addition to a professional one, but the conclusion leans more toward the idea that to be truly devoted to your discipline, you need to serve it with a slavish dedication that shuts out all else.

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Phallacy by Carl Djerassi
Directed by Elena Araoz
May 18-June 10
Tuesday through Saturday, 8PM
Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, 3PM
Tickets ($35), 212-239-6200 or 800-432-7250
Cherry Lane Theater
38 Commerce St.