I’m not a prude,” says Mark Swanson, “but it does feel strange telling the singers to be sure to enunciate fuck-ing.”
He’s the music director for Donny Johns, a new musical opening at UMass Amherst this weekend. It’s a way-updated riff on the Don Juan story, set on a college campus “somewhere in the middle of America.”
But the Midwestern setting shouldn’t make us think it has nothing to do with our own hometown university. The script is the work of two UMass theater faculty members, Harley Erdman and Gina Kaufmann, for whom it’s a reflection of “the real world that we operate in on a daily basis,” as Erdman explained when I visited a rehearsal last week.
The original Don Juan, by the 17th-century Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina, is crammed with themes that resonate on today’s college campus, Erdman says: “Privilege, hook-up culture, gender roles, sexual mores.” This new version begins with a sweet harmony quartet warbling the Sayville College alma mater: “Sayville, we are ever loyal, Sayville, we are always true …” Then, as a crowd of classmates burst in, the music turns raunchy, and so do the words:
“Sayville’s where we forge connections … for studying and fucking, too!”
This take on the myth of the compulsive cocksman focuses as much, or more, on the women involved, “fleshing out their stories and who they are as people, so that we can have a much more conflicted, nuanced experience of the story,” says Kaufmann.
Two of the women are Olivia, a philosophy professor (Lisa Abend), and one of her students (Lily Filippatos), with whom she’s in a tantalizing, no-sex-before-graduation relationship. Which launches the young woman into a one-night stand with Donny Johns (Brendan Lynch), who’s all-but-engaged to fellow student Ann (Emily Tanch) while also eyeing Teresa (Fatima Cadet-Diaby), a Latina waitress at the local diner.
The guitar-driven, indie-rock score is by Brooklyn-based composer Aaron Jones. Erdman comments that despite its rock roots, it’s very melodic. “I like the idea from the ’30s and ’40s, that you walk out of the theater humming a tune, and Aaron’s got to that place. It’s fresh and honest,” he says, “with a kind of sincerity and joyfulness and passion. It has made the work different from what Gina and I originally imagined.”
The cast of two dozen students is augmented by four older actors from the Valley community: Lisa Abend as the randy-but-reticent professor; Hala Lord as the college’s new president, a black woman in a whitebread world; Sam Samuels as her donor-conscious board chairman; and Uriah Rodriguez as the statue of the college’s founder — an ancestor of current student Donny Johns.
This production is a developmental workshop, aimed at trying out the material (with nightly audience feedback) before further rewriting. There’s minimal lighting, sets and props, “all in the service of telling the story fully,” Kaufmann told me during a break in rehearsal. “We don’t have anything we don’t actually need, so that the audience can focus on the music and the story and respond to it.”
Then, as the actors regrouped, she called out, “Right. Let’s take it again, from Devin’s solo about anal penetration.”•
Nov. 19-21, Dec. 3-5, Curtain Theater, UMass, Amherst, umass.edu/theater, tickets 545-2511 or 800-999-UMAS.
Photos by Brendan Lynch
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann.
