Don Juan in Hell

As it happens, the four actors in the Irish Repertory revival of the Shaw piece–Donal Donnelly, Celeste Holm, James A. Stephens, and Fritz Weaver–don’t sit on a divan. Garbed in evening clothes, they place themselves on four Chippendale chairs with claret upholstery. They also flip the pages of the binders in which their scripts lie and occasionally sip water from tumblers resting on two end tables. But, divan or no divan, they’re still able to talk, talk, talk uninterruptedly for nearly two intermissionless hours.

Some theatergoers know–and some don’t–that Don Juan in Hell is an extended segment in the third act of Shaw’s Man and Superman. Never one, when he was waxing polemical, to use 10 words what he could use 100, the dramatist didn’t keep Man and Superman brief. Why should he, when he wanted to address Nietzschean attitudes that had only recently begun to spread abroad from Germany, as well as to continue commenting in his own insistent way about the disparities afflicting man-woman relationships?

With Shaw running off at the mouth, you can imagine how long it takes for the entire play to unfold. Too long to encourage frequent presentations of the complete work–so decades back, it occurred to some enterprising person to extract a third-act dream sequence and present it as self-contained play. It’s the part in which Man and Superman protagonist John Tanner dreams that, having transmogrified into Don Juan, he is in hell, and has been for a good, long while. Perhaps Shaw himself was behind the excision decision, since he was already on record as having referred to the Don Juan digression as “totally extraneous.”

This hunk of dramatic writing was given the Don Juan in Hell tag, and a new play was made. The original play had come about because one of Shaw’s colleagues, Arthur Bingham Walkley, had apparently requested a Don Juan play. Shaw took the suggestion seriously–as seriously as the playful wordsmith ever took anything–and ran up a Don Juan who was modernized but not slick and reassuring. As he wrote in a letter to Walkley that serves as the foreword to Man and Superman, “[I]t annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable… If you don’t like my preaching you must lump it.”

Not the most encouraging words for an audience to consider when they’re about to spend a couple of hours where the only people in the theater whom the playwright wants to be comfortable are the four actors sitting around gabbing. Yet the Irish Repertory production, directed by Charlotte Moore as if magically not directed, proves that smart talk can be endlessly engaging–or close enough to endlessly engaging to engender delight, even as Shaw’s more instructive intentions become clear.