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Haunting and Adaptations of the Don Juan Legend

2023; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Volume: 198; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hsf.2023.a901029

2165-6185

Emmy Herland,

Philippine History and Culture

Haunting and Adaptations of the Don Juan Legend Emmy Herland That the theater is the space of ghosts is a well-established theory. Not only has theater staged ghosts around the globe practically since its inception, but also in the last century theatrologists have repeatedly proposed that the practice of theater is an inherently haunted endeavor. Marvin Carlson has claimed that theater is “particularly obsessed with memory and ghosting,” telling stories of the past and making them present in the room in a way that ghosts can similarly achieve by returning and manifesting a past (or passed) figure as if it were living (7). The coming-to-life of theater, whether it is a story based in past reality or not, mimics the apparition of a ghost, which comes to life but is also not truly alive. Similarly, Hélène Cixous has said, “Theater is by definition the stage where the living meet and confront the dead, the forgotten and the forgetters, the buried and the ghosts, the present, the passing, the present past and the passed past . . . The dead are not always as dead as we think nor the living as living as they think” (306). In plays that represent the past the living performers and audience must confront that which might otherwise be presumed dead. In a fictional play, actors still represent the nonliving, only in this case it is in the sense that the characters they play never lived at all. This meeting between the living and the dead is multiplied, I argue, for retellings or adaptations of tales from the past, as that classic tale is revived to haunt as well. This article will compare two modern adaptations of the Don Juan legend, whose ostensible original text, the Early Modern El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, was long attributed to Tirso de Molina and more recently credited to Andrés de Claramonte. In this first written iteration of the tale, Don Juan repeatedly manipulates women into sexual encounters with the promise of marriage, which he never intends to fulfill. During one such scene he is caught by the victim’s father, Don Gonzalo, whom he fights and kills. It is the tomb effigy of Don Gonzalo that returns, as a ghost would, to punish Don Juan’s transgressions and drag him to hell. The first of the retellings I will study is Octavio Solis’s 1987 Man of the Flesh, which sets the action amongst predominantly Latino characters (with the exception [End Page 49] of the white Downey family) in the United States. The sparse scholarship on Man of the Flesh is split as to whether this play is an adaptation of El burlador de Sevilla (as Bergmann and Friedman, and Huerta claim) or José Zorilla’s 1844 Don Juan Tenorio (according to Antón-Pacheco), itself an adaptation of the earlier Golden Age drama. Certain details, such as the existence of a character named Luis, signal more towards Zorillas’s text than Claramonte’s. In Zorillas’s play, Don Luis is a close friend of Don Juan with whom Don Juan makes a bet that he will be able to seduce both an engaged woman and a noviciate about to take her vows. When it turns out that the engaged woman that Don Juan seduces is Don Luis’s own fiancée, he challenges Don Juan to a duel and is killed, as is Don Juan’s other victim’s father, Don Gonzalo. However, given that Don Juan Tenorio uses El burlador de Sevilla as a base text, both contain the main elements that are adapted by Solis, namely the character of Juan, who is a notorious predator of young women; his various sexual encounters, at least one of which results in a murder; and his final confrontation with the ghosts of his deceased victims. The second adaptation I will address is José Gabriel López de Antuñano and Ignacio García’s Dom Juan: Les morts ne sont pas morts, first staged in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in December 2020 and which recontextualizes the same story elements previously mentioned to the context of the Ivory Coast. Adaptations of the Don...