Overview
Long one act which could be a full evening of theatre. Don Giovanni is getting on in years and finding it increasingly difficult to climb up those balconies. His disgruntled servant Leporello is trying to write his tell-all memoirs in the hope that he can retire on what he makes from them. Donna Elvira has lost her mind, convinced that she is married to Don Giovanni, when in fact he paid a horse doctor to pretend to marry them, and is chasing her beloved all over Europe, first to declare her undying devotion to him, then, when he ties her to the bed and escapes down the drain pipe, to murder him. Meanwhile, Don Giovanni and Leporello take shelter from a rainstorm in what turns out to be the tomb of the Commendatore, whom Don Giovanni has accidentally murdered while trying to seduce his daughter, Donna Anna. A drunken and troubled Don Giovanni, who is beginning to have mixed feelings about his life as a seducer, invites the Statue of the Commendatore in the tomb to come to dinner at his own house, which Don Giovanni plans to return to so he can finally seduce Donna Anna. But when he gets there, he discovers that the poor girl has slipped into a terrible despair after the death of her father, and is, for the first time in his life, moved enough by the suffering he's caused in another to think of somebody besides himself. Will Don Giovanni learn to love unselfishly before the Statue of the Commendatore returns to drag him down to Hell? A wild and funny investigation of one of the most enduring myths of Western civilization.
Published in Don Giovanni & Other Plays.