Don Juan in Chicago

Don Juan in Chicago

Don Juan in Chicago

Don Juan in Chicago

Overview

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.

Authors

David Ives

David Ives has been active in the American theatre for 50 years. His shows include All In The Timing, Time Flies, Venus In Fur, New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza, and four verse adaptations of French comedies, as well as radio plays that are available onli ...
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