THE STORY: Don Juan is a handsome, rich, sexually naive nobleman in sixteenth-century Spain. His servant, Leporello, urges him to find a girlfriend and lead a normal life, but the Don is more interested in finding the meaning of life through books and alchemy. Afraid he won’t have time to find it, Don Juan calls up the Devil and cuts a deal that grants him (and Leporello) immortality—as long as Don Juan seduces a different woman every day. Unfortunately, the first woman he seduces is Dona Elvira, his true love. Infuriated by the Don’s abandonment, Elvira cuts her own deal with the Devil: She won’t die until she sleeps with Don Juan a second time. Four hundred years later, exhausted by endless sex and still pursued by Elvira, Don Juan and Leporello grapple with the sexual mores of contemporary urban America as embodied by Sandy, a woman of wide and wild sexual experience. Don also meets the young and innocent Zoey—who happens to be his daughter by Sandy. With never any time to pursue the meaning of life, Don Juan swears off sex after promising Elvira one last evening with her. Hearing this, the Devil calls in his debt. Don Juan, Leporello and Elvira face damnation, only to be redeemed by the Devil, who, moved by Don Juan’s “unfailing niceness,” sends them all on to eternal bliss.
Another hilarious comedy from the award-winning author of
All in the Timing.
“David Ives’ DON JUAN IN CHICAGO…is fantastically quirky and clever. The characters speak most of the play in verse, and the rhymes are so silly and fun that you find yourself hanging on every delicious word.” —BackStage.
“In DON JUAN, Ives’s ear for crackpot coinages…and mischievous off-key rhymes…is as good as ever…” —The New Yorker.
“Ives has a lively wit…an original mind, and a neatly topsy-turvy way with life’s little realities…[DON JUAN] is a brashly funny way to spend a couple of hours.” —New York Post.
