theater Wilma Theater

Theater review: Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq

Brave. Messy. Smart. Eerie. Funny. Scary. Profound. Great.

WAR IS HELL: Kate Czajkowski and Keith J. Conallen in <em>Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq</em>.
Alexander Iziliaev

Let’s put some adjectives up front about Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq at the Wilma Theater: Brave. Messy. Smart. Eerie. Funny. Scary. Profound. Great. 

And let’s throw in a few gushing phrases, too: What theater should be. Theater meeting life in a head-on collision. Theater grabbing us by the shirt and smacking us into walls. Theater that makes us weep, wail — maybe even hope. 

Now, maybe, I can take a deep breath and discuss this extraordinary event.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) teamed with Wilma artistic director Blanka Zizka to develop a new work loosely based on German playwright Odon von Horvath’s 1936 play Don Juan Comes Home From the War. This premiere is the culmination of two years of work with an ensemble cast, fueled by interviews and writing workshops with vetarans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

But for all its documentation — read the lobby displays of solidiers’ confessional poems and photos — Don Juan is never a documentary. The real evils of war are present and pervasive, but there’s a hint of George Bernard Shaw’s whimsically supernatural Don Juan in Hell, too. For Vogel, hell is both fantastical and savagely real.

Keith J. Conallen plays the title role, here a Marine captain and “naughty, naughty boy” whose legendary success with women turns ugly in Iraq — flashbacks reveal he sexually preyed on female soldiers in his unit. Vogel focuses on Juan’s return to Philadelphia in search of Cressida (Kate Czajkowski), the woman he fell in love with between deployments. “I’m not losing my soul under your command,” Cressida exclaimed the last time he saw her, but it’s Juan’s soul that needs finding — and saving. 

As in her other plays, Vogel skips through time, space and consciousness with skillful ease and revelatory humor, and Juan’s search for Cressida becomes a Philadelphia odyssey. Juan stays at the Divine Lorraine Hotel, only later learning that it’s been an abandoned relic for decades. Who were his ghostly hosts? He stumbles into the Mütter Museum, where a black-clad curator (Sarah Gliko) tours his life, exposing the dark sides of his soul — and our city’s. Juan visits Osage Avenue in 1985, encounters an 1800’s grave-robbing medical researcher and visits Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern, where the first Marines were recruited. He also duels Ben Franklin, who composes a poem while fencing, a la Cyrano. 

The superlative ensemble features Melanye Finister, Yvette Ganier, Hannah Gold, Kevin Meehan, Brian Ratcliffe and Lindsay Smiling, who play dozens of roles with naked, ferocious sincerity. Still, Vogel never preaches — the issues emerge through intense personal experience, not commentary. 

Zizka’s staging complements the play’s nonlinear, surreal aspects very well, while also framing the cast’s gritty sincerity. Matt Saunders’ set is primarily a massive black platform that’s constantly moving — tilting toward us, away, or from side to side, creating new angles, spaces and insights just as the script does. Thom Weaver’s lighting is suitably bold and stark, and Vasilija Zivanic’s costumes succinctly define characters. Daniel Perelstein’s sound design is often enveloping, making battle tangible and sculpting the play’s diverse locations and moods. 

Zizka, the designers and the actors — everyone involved in this monumental production — work with commited intensity. No one’s cowed by long silences, loud music, comedy, horror or jarring juxtapositions. At the end of this intermission-less 110-minute play, it’s clear through Conallen’s career-defining performance that Don Juan has suffered. But has he learned anything? Humbled and broken, he earns our empathy, respect and maybe even forgiveness. But Vogel wisely resists easy answers. There are none : This is war. Because of this honesty, Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq may become the definitive portrayal of America’s 21st-century war experience. 

Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq, through April 20, $20-$49, Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 215-546-7824, wilmatheater.org.