Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq

  

  Returned From the Front, a Predator Still at War

  Charles Isherwood

  March 28, 2014: PHILADELPHIA — Under the destabilizing pressure of his wartime experience, not to mention the cruel workings of his own personal demons, an American Marine disintegrates before our eyes in Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq, a new drama by Paula Vogel having its premiere at the Wilma Theater here. The play was loosely inspired by Don Juan Comes Back From the War (1936), by the Austro-Hungarian writer Odon von Horvath, in which the Lothario of legend wanders through Berlin in the grim aftermath of the First World War in search of the woman he loved and scorned. Although it differs from the original in almost all particulars, Ms. Vogel’s play also concerns the odyssey of a man named Don Juan (Keith J. Conallen) who is haunted by the fate of a woman he became involved with after meeting her in Philadelphia between deployments.

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• THE INQUIRER REVIEW OF Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq

  

  Review: DON JUAN COMES HOME FROM IRAQ

  Toby Zinman

  March 30, 2014: Wow. Paula Vogel's new play, Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq at the Wilma Theater, is a powerful anti-war play. It is also powerfully theatrical and emotionally and intellectually challenging. In other words, it's terrific. This premiere production, under the daring direction of Blanka Zizka, makes its timeless point at a remarkably timely moment, just when various sex scandals are making headlines as male military officers exert their power over the women under their command. Don Juan (Keith J. Conallen), up to his usual seductive, ruthless no-good, is here a Marine captain, back in Philadelphia after four deployments in Iraq, suffering from unbearable pain in his head and unbearable numbness in his soul.

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• PHILLYMAG.COM REVIEW OF Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq

  

  Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq Sheds New Light on Buried Stories

  Hannah Feinberg

  March 28, 2014: Don Juan is not in hell; he’s in purgatory. Well, he’s in Philadelphia, but it sure is infernal. The Wilma Theater’s latest, Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq, re-imagines the titular libertine as a returning Iraqi vet, searching for his lost love Cressida in a fire-and-brimstone iteration of Philadelphia. Here, he must battle his past and confront his present, which appear as hallucinatory jumps in space and time. The play, penned by Pulitzer-winner Paula Vogel and directed by Blanka Zizka, is beautifully staged and lit (courtesy of Matt Saunders and Thom Weaver) with brave, if somewhat incomplete, exploration of the moral conundrums of modern war.

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• NEWSWORKS REVIEW OF Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq

  

  Review: Still at war, 'Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq'

  Howard Shaprio

  March 27, 2014: What do you leave out? That may be a question for Paula Vogel, the celebrated playwright whose new work opened in a world premiere at Wilma Theater on Wednesday. It's a difficult question, especially after two years of research and collaboration with a theater company and its long-hired cast. If Vogel answers it, her sprawling, inventive Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq will fine-tune its focus – and its power will surge even more. Vogel's play about a Marine platoon leader who's mentally broken after his mission in Iraq honors anti-war plays over the centuries – one of them is the 1936 play Don Juan Comes Back from the War by Austro-Hungarian Ödön von Horváth. While Vogel's play is not an example of what's called "devised theater" – theater artists come together and collectively create a play and its production – it has some of those elements: Blanka Zizka, Wilma's artistic director, was involved from the beginning in 2011, the cast was hired early on to work during the play's development, and the process included many interviews with soldiers returning or on leave from Afghanistan and Iraq.

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• BROAD STREET REVIEW REVIEW OF Don Juan Comes Home From Iraq

  

  ‘Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq’ at the Wilma - A marine in freefall

  Steve Cohen

  March 28, 2014: This is a spectacular production on a serious topic. Throughout the one act, hour and fifty-minute drama we see creative stagecraft and striking visual images conveying the horrors of the Iraq war and its aftermath. Don Juan is a Marine captain who returns from Iraq suffering from trauma, partly the result of an incident we see in the play’s first scene. Dazed and hallucinating, Juan time-travels in a foggy world where historic figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Mother Teresa emerge and Juan has conversations with friends who are dead.

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