Don Juan of Vicente Molina Foix on his trip to a continent imagined: the failure of his attempt to conquer freedom

Abstract

The last Don Juan is an original theatrical proposal in which Molina Foix recovers the myth of Don Juan to offer his interpretation, in which women are the true architects of the legendary seducer who they need to survive and who appears here as a projection of their desires. Don Juan feels like a mere reproduction of other Don Juans, who preceded him. This lack of originality, of which is aware, leads him to deny the use of the word (which is not his). Before, however, he tries get rid of the humiliating role of the seducer who conquers just because women need to be seduced in a donjuanesque way, via a dream in which he travels to a wild continent: a sort of El Dorado. In the act entitled "The Discovery" a utopia is created: a world in which, turned into a conqueror, he submits women and humiliates his rivals. When he leaves the wild and exuberant land, that he imagined and then destroyed, he takes with an indigenous woman and a large gold figure that she gave him. The golden idol, which resembles the statue of the Commander and at the same time the image of the father, symbolizes the failure of his attempt to conquer freedom. Don Juan recognizes it, abandons his utopia, giving up his dreams of power, his desire to break an endless series of Don Juan's repetitions in which he is forced to participate, involved in the incessant life cycle that predetermines his death and reborn.

Keywords: utopia, Don Juan myth, theater of democracy in Spain, theater of Vicente Molina Foix, Molina Foix’s and Robert Wilson’s Don Juan