I'm not a feminist, you may have noticed: but I think I see some misogynist elements in the attitudes we bring to this Don Juan business.Īny good treatment of the theme has to deal with this, from Molière's, the earliest I've studied, to John Berger's, the most recent. He's hard on women, there's no doubt about it: but that's mainly because of two things: their vulnerability to pregnancy (and, it must be added, STDs), and the considerable apparatus of disapproval society has constructed to keep women from developing their own lives. What always interests me about the Don Juan story is its moral (and ethical) ambiguity. Noise Within performed a translation by Richard Nelson: except for some judicious cutting (notably in Molière's opening panegyric to tobacco) it was quite faithful to the original. I'd read the original to prepare for that, and revisited it again this last week, in an ancient two-volume edition (Paris, 1873).
It was diverting and enterprising: but, like the Figaro we saw there a few weeks ago, it was heavily adapted deliberately folded into both Da Ponte's version and George Bernard Shaw's. We'd seen a version of Don Juan quite a while ago, in 1994, when le Theâtre de la jeune lune brought their adaptation to Berkeley Rep. All these productions were truly excellent: together with productions of Euripides, Gozzi, Chekhov, and Ibsen, they persuade me that Noise Within is at its best with theater in translation, however loyal they may be to their Shakespeare survey and their American rep. In the past we've seen other French rep here: Racine's Phaedra, Ubu Roi, Feydau's A Flea in her Ear, Molière's School for Wives and The Miser, Marivaux's The Triumph of Love - not bad for six seasons. We saw it at A Noise Within, the Glendale repertory company we've visited twice annually for a number of years. But Molière has some fun with it, and uses it to make some points still well worth considering.Īnd it made a splendid end to our tour of theater here: five plays in seven days, three of them first-rate, two of them problematic, as noted earlier. That's unfair, of course no one plumbed the depth of the human conditions more, conditions in the plural, than Mozart and Da Ponte. M OLIERE'S DON JUAN is truly a wonderful play if it's neglected here, it's probably because of Mozart and Da Ponte, who did even more with the theme. And now that we're surrounded by vineyards the damn squirrels have probably all moved over here onto our place, safe from irrigation, discing, spraying, and all that. We like our foxes, bobcats, owls, coyotes, for the same reason. We like snakes: they eat ground squirrels. Today we saw a hawk carrying a snake, always a good omen, though hard on snakes. You can see the left half is far behind the right, downhill half: I think that's the result of ground squirrels, of all things they've turned that field into Swiss cheese, and the willow's roots are getting mostly air rather than nutrients and water. On Monday we watched a specialist take down the dead stone pine that used to stand beyond the workshop, at the right of the house and now I'm worrying about the corkscrew willow to the left of the driveway gate.
My own little vineyard over on the left hasn't really been irrigated yet I always want to let it go dry, but usually give in out of sympathy by midsummer - though this time I won't be here to watch it fry. The field this side the hedge is mown and green it's below our leach-field, which keeps it green. In spite of a very slight rain a few days back, the hills have turned brown - we Californians prefer to call it "golden." The vineyard beyond our house is irrigated, of course and so is Lindsey's garden, within our hedge. Here's what it looks like, from our ridge, where I walked this afternoon with my 30-pound backpack (I'm in training). It's been a busy time, partly with the trip to Los Angeles last week, partly with the sudden arrival of Spring, followed, apparently, by an early Summer. I'll probably get back to that in a few days. YES, I KNOW : the little Milhaud survey is to be completed.
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