Jerry Colbert    Catherine Harrison  

Henry Buckley    Graham Smith

in

G. B. Shaw's

Don Juan in Hell

at the Mint Museum

directed by George Gray

            June, 1995         

Producer's Program Note

I was on the phone with Gladys Lavitan a month ago, we were already in rehearsal but I hadn't found a Statue, did she know of anyone? One thing led to another, she was very excited about the play. "You know, of course," she said, "this was the first play Dorothy did at the Mint..." It was? 

"Oh, yes, before they even had a theatre, it was marvelous, you know who was in it, that Charles Kurault." 
Charles Kurault? 

I dashed a letter off to Charley (I knew someone who'd known him well: maybe he'd like to read the Statue), then settled back to ponder on coincidence and fate. (Charley wrote back: "I am charmed by the thought of seeing Don Juan in Hell again, and even more so by the thought of taking part in the reading. Alas, I have something else to do that week, but I thank you for inviting me. "Somewhere there is a picture of me as the twenty-one-year-old Devil, a great part!" I've looked all over town.) 

***** 

The only time I recall meeting Dorothy Masterson was in 1983, not long before she left town, at City Hall, where we waited to be heard in the last gasp of appeal for the Mint Museum Drama Guild. She cackled and winked as she told me people always said she and my dad were married in the theatre. I have only one vague childhood memory of coming to the Mint to see a show, a sense of dark wood and velvet not at all like the present-day Van Every Forum. I know my dad spent hours listening to the record of John Brown's Body and repeating the lines into his Webcor tape recorder in the back bedroom the last year he lived at home; but was he in it at the Mint, or did he see it there and stage it in Gastonia, the way he did Don Juan in Hell (which I thought I'd forgotten)? When he and Dorothy shared top billing the Mint, I was off at school; then the Army, grad school, off and gone. By the time I came back to Charlotte, it was all over. 

So why have I always had this feeling I'm connected to the Drama Guild? Am I the long-lost stage-son in their stage-relationship, like the phantom child of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Maybe it's as simple as this. When I began to study modern playwrights (Giraudoux, Anouihl, Brecht, Shaw) I recognized their names from Mint Museum playbills. Dorothy was known for choosing good plays. In any case, the coincidence of our both starting out at the Mint with the same obscure play seemed almost magical. 
(Especially since it's not the first time. Believe it or not, in 1989 I directed Arthur Miller's All My Sons for the Golden Circle Theatre, not knowing Dad had played Joe Keller , nor that it was the first show in the Mint's new theatre-in-the-round.) 

***** 

I chose Don Juan in Hell because, as John Mason Brown wrote almost a half century ago, it remains "utterly and urgently contemporary," more so now than then. In 1951, Shaw's predictions of the sexual revolution and the breakdown of marriage and family institutions of today were beyond the scope of even such astute thinkers as the distinguished critic; today the Devil's diatribe on war and economics seems commonplace: "Over such battles," he notes, " the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, while the strongest ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk." 

One more example: The Statue urges Dona Ana: "No, no, no, my child: do not pray. If you do, you will throw away the main advantage of this place. Written over the gate here are the words 'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.' Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself." Hell sounds like an inner city ghetto. 

Maybe the only real hope is that Don Juan's prediction of the Superman comes true in time. 

***** 

I'd like to think that Dorothy would be pleased with our Don Juan, and with the upcoming season of S'Words. And now, as I've heard she would say, it's Magic Time!