Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 82

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Popular Culture Review

each other and underscore the possibility that the sidekick really represents another
facet of don Giovanni’s personality. In most don Juan literature, the servant, be he
Tirso’s Catalinon,^ Moliere’s Sganarelle, or Mozart’s Leporello, becomes an alter
ego who, at times, secretly empathizes with the female victims, even though he
often envies his master’s ability for seduction.^ In Sellars’s production, Leporello’s
overt sarcasm and disgust with don Giovanni’s escapades clearly cast him in the
role of conscience.
The women in the opera undergo similar transformations. Donna Anna, a
high-society woman, who wears basic black and understated jewelry, seems to be
one of don Giovanni’s customers. Following her father’s death, while she begs
Ottavio to postpone their wedding, donna Anna pulls out a rubber hose and syringe
and shoots up. Sellars clearly suggests that donna Anna uses this physical rush to
fill an emotional void. Donna Elvira looks like a down and out punker in her tigerstriped mini-skirt, red-leopard stockings, and dangling cross-shaped earring. She
carries a knife and resides in a tenement apartment complex complete with broken
buzzer system and cracked glass door. Zerlina, an Asian-American, strives for
lower-middle class respectability in her interracial marriage to the black Masetto.
The audience later discovers that she is a victim of domestic violence.
The most pronounced change in this opera is the social class and race to
which don Giovanni pertains. In traditional don Juan literature, although the
protagonist seduces women of all economic classes, he himself is wealthy or, at
least, comfortable. In fact, his privileged economic status often facilitates his
seductions of poor women. This white wealthy male, a full-fledged member of the
ideological hegemony, victimizes those who occupy inferior positions in the social
hierarchy. Casting don Giovanni as a poor black male, however, plays havoc with
the dynamics of his seductions. The place he occupies in the racial and economic
strata is at odds with his sexual ranking. Although his gender may place him above
the women he seduces, his race and class relegate don Giovanni to an inferior
position. Seen in this light, don Giovanni is simultaneously victim and victimizer.
When he rapes white women, he subjugates the race that has oppressed him for
centuries. By selling them drugs, he not only ensures their physical and emotional
dependence but avenges similar injustices committed against members of his own
race and class. Sellars has taken an aggressive stance vis a vis the customary opera
audience. This production warns affluent white spectators that opera is not just for
entertainment anymore. In many ways, Peter Sellars’s Don Giovanni is as “in your
face" as the latest black rapper’s invective on police brutality and urban violence.
The rap song and this particular version of the opera prey on mainstream white
culture’s fears of retaliation from marginalized blacks. It is worthy of note that in
this production don Giovanni does not seduce a woman of his own race. The closest
he comes to seducing a marginalized equal is with Zerlina, played by Ai Lan Zhu,