So this project was originally slated for last season; how has the pandemic shaped this production and your approach to the play?

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Yeah, almost a year later! COVID has inserted itself in the process, in my mind, as a grumpy collaborator. It has posed challenges, created difficulties, but also forced us to re-visit ideas around the staging and props use which freed us to make more interesting choices. Choices that tend towards the abstract which I find more exciting theatrically, such as how do you engage with bodies from a distance? and are there objects/props that can do that work?

You would think that a several month delay would give time to consider and reconsider the design, but I didn’t give it much thought during the lockdown, mostly it was just floating around in my subconscious and every once in a while a thought would occur, and I would chat with Amy about it, or adjust something in the set or lighting plot. I guess it was nice to have the time for things to steep. The hardest thing was trying to remember what we were talking about and why we made certain decisions so long ago.

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What was your overall vision for the show? How do you make the Don Juan myth fresh?

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My overall vision is a version of austerity, something that is prevalent in our world right now as well as in the post-war worlds of the play. I have started to refer to it as “the Colour of Used.” -which isn’t exactly a colour, but more of a muted feeling or atmosphere. It’s a concept that includes re-using, making do with what you already have, sustainability, anti-capitalism, and entropy. Hopefully this will seep into all the elements of the design, so everything from the set to the props to the costumes to the paint, and even the lights should reflect this in some way.

We are not setting the play as a period piece, but thinking of Don Juan as coming back from all the wars, all the times. This decision enabled a freedom in our choices specifically in the costumes and props by allowing us to pull from stock without being too concerned about being “period specific” -which, of course, is considerably more expensive, and the movies do it better anyway. By opening up the time period to an an asynchronous “all times” it, by definition, includes 2021. To quote Amy:
“[We're] not staging the play as a period piece since it was a hybrid of post-
World War I Berlin seen through the filter of post-Weimar Republic 1936 and then adapted in 2012 and presented in 2020 [now 2021]. Furthermore, we add the filter of a Canadian audience watching and Canadian production team working on an English script based on an Austro-Hungarian author writing about post-war Berlin."

As far as making the myth fresh…  all I can say is that we are doing it in 2021, and very aware of that.

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