DETAILS

The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan presented by ATP
Martha Cohen Theatre
Tuesday, March 24 - Saturday, April 11

More in: Theatre

Despite the reduced scale of their carved performers, The Old Trout Puppet Workshop has never been afraid to tackle enormous subjects like revolution, loss, death and, now, love. Still, puppets tend to present unique challenges in exploring the human condition. “It turns out sex with puppets is a lot weirder than death with puppets,” says Trout member Judd Palmer.

On the heels of their touring hit Famous Puppet Death Scenes, Calgary’s venerable puppet masters have partnered with Alberta Theatre Projects to première The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan, a postmortem tale narrated by literature’s most iconic cad.

Directed by Vanessa Porteous, the soon-to-be artistic director of Alberta Theatre Projects, scored by composer George Fenwick and co-written by the Trouts with Mercedes Bátiz-Benét, the play takes place in an infernal cell where Don Juan has been incarcerated for his legendary 1,000 indiscretions. Shifting between moments in his life in what Palmer calls “a kinky baroque cabinet of curiosities,” Don Juan is cursed to forever relive his damned (or gifted) life — albeit with the subtle misdirection of a man who believes he is on the side of the angels.

Employing life-sized puppets, including the Trout’s Peter Balkwill as a chastity-belt-bound Don Juan, the human scale of the production is a noticeable change from the relative economy of Famous Puppet Death Scenes, with the latter’s self-contained puppet stage and playing area. Along with Fenwick’s score, recorded by a quartet and the 30-member Spiritus Chamber Choir, the enlarged result is, as Porteous notes, characteristically uncharacteristic of the company. “This show is, like every Trout show, a real departure for the Trouts,” she says. “It still looks very Trouty but refined, baroque, detailed and sophisticated.”

Don Juan marks the Trouts’ second collaboration with Alberta Theatre Projects, the first being a 2004 adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio that hewed to the serialized story’s original, darker tone. However, onerous technical requirements restricted the show’s suitability for touring. It wasn’t until Famous Puppet Death Scenes that the Trouts found widespread success in Canada, the United States and, with an upcoming fall tour, Europe. The company has even cemented its status as a puppet institution, initiating annual puppet workshops at The Banff Centre and auditioning nationally for its current apprentices.

Whereas in Famous Puppet Death Scenes the Trouts created a fictional canon of puppet plays to feed its puppet-destroying innards, in Don Juan, the Trouts have used a bona fide literary icon to explore love, sex and the murky territory between them. Constantly revisited since his introduction in Tirso de Molina’s 17th century play The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, the man with 1,000 lovers has become a figure of contradiction that makes him ideal for discussing the frustrations of the human condition. “It all feels like [de Molina] discovered him, that he already existed as a universal type,” says Porteous. “Is he a hero or a cad? Does he care about all the people he’s been with, or is he selfish? Is one night of amazing love actually worth a lifetime of safe companionship?”

“I think these questions are pertinent to everyone alive who’s honest with themselves,” she adds. “It’s complicated and loaded territory, as soon as you try to sort it out you run into your own contradictions and hypocrisies.”

In following a show about death with one about love, the Trouts and their collaborators seem to be courting a deliberate contradiction based on two essential human obsessions. With de Molina returning to Spain from Mexico during the peak of the Spanish conquest of the New World, Palmer sees an important parallel between the violence of Spain’s literal conquests and Don Juan’s sexual ones. It’s a connection formed in no small part by the company’s three months spent in Guanajuato, Mexico following the loss of their Ramsay workshop.

For Palmer, the company’s time in Mexico provided an essential influence on the production, something baroque and visceral. He recalls a veteran mariachi guitarist playing on the bloodied sand of a cock-fighting ring, or the reverence for the almost puppet-like effigies of the church. And in the character of the most notorious lover of all time, he sees something even older and more essentially human. “He seems to me to be something that is far older and stranger in our consciousness, some caveman who had a bunch of lovers and this fermented resentment among his compatriots, who then told tales around the fires in the cave,” says Palmer. “He’s always there, lurking in the background, a benevolent or malevolent spirit who presides over the conversation of what love is and what it means and how you should live with it — its demands and its pleasures.”