Peter Sellars Presents A Dark `Don Giovanni'

``Don Giovanni'' a jocular drama?

That might be the designation that Mozart and his librettist, Da Ponte, gave their second operatic collaboration, but no hint remains of anything playful in this tale of the world's greatest lover as retold by Peter Sellars on public television tonight (KCTS' ``Great Performances'' at 10 p.m.).

Sellars, in his second production of the Mozart-da Ponte trilogy, presents a drama darkened to the edge of despair by the little-understood drives that dominate human existence.

Guns and knives appear in the hands of both sexes throughout a hard-driven performance that threatens to give way to chaos and violence at every turn of Giovanni's path to final perdition.

Asking just what Mozart himself found his opera to be, one

scholar notes that ``there has been much searching of heart as to whether `Giovanni' is properly to be classified as a tragedy or a comedy or what not.''

Sellars clearly opts for ``what not,'' moving Mozart's Stone Guest from Seville to the squalor of the South Bronx, where during the overture to the opera the camera dwells - effectively - on a dead rat among the detritus that litters the street where the entire story plays.

In turgid pre-performance commentary Sellars states that ``Giovanni'' is a play about eternal damnation that offers a rape and a murder within its first 90 seconds.

``It's a completely shattering experience,'' says today's major

enfant terrible of the opera - and he makes it precisely that for TV viewers.

No audience was present at the taping of these performances in Vienna, and the story unfolds with an intense singularity.

Sellars has further used close-ups to stress the depth of dramatic tensions in ``Giovanni,'' making this production a profound character study.

``It's about human sexuality,'' he points out in his introductory remarks, ``the one thing that none of us really knows how to talk about. It's something that we're still struggling to begin to understand. It's too immense, too dark, too dangerous; it's the one area that we ourselves are still in the dark about it. We don't have the words to talk about it; only music gets right in there and probes those dark, weird crevasses of the soul.''

And probe Sellars does, displaying a panorama of personalities torn by the contradictions that motivate them.

Like many directors before him, Sellars does not tell exactly what went on in Anna's room before the curtain rises on the opera.

Had Giovanni got what he came for, or was Anna able to defend herself against his advances?

And Zerlina, good for little more than a rustic romp in most productions, takes on new dimensions in Sellar's hands.

Masetto does beat her before she assuages him with ``Batti, batti''; the blows are heard off-stage, and the scene in which she ties Leporello to a chair - omitted in almost every production - is included here.

Sellars' major coup, however, lies in the casting of identical twin brothers Eugene and Herbert Perry as Giovanni and Leporello.

To the confusion of the viewers, the Perrys move through the opera in identical dress - jeans, black T shirts and leather bomber jackets, bringing the complexity of the Doppelgaenger to the story.

(To keep things straight, Leporello wears Guess jeans. Don't try to identify the Perrys by the rhinestone in the left ear lobe; each wears one.)

In intermission comments, Sellars suggests that the opera is in equal measure about the damnation of Giovanni and the salvation of Leporello, recalling the now-aged observation of Christopher Benn that ``Leporello is the central figure of the opera; he is the one real person, the firm rock of reality in the midst of a dream.''

It's a point worth serious contemplation, for - again as Sellars notes - we also are all implicated in this same struggle.

Though many of Sellars' touches are open to question, a good ``Giovanni'' is always an encounter with absolutes; Sellars brings to the score an ever greater dramatic - and personal - impact.