Can't go wrong with G.B. Shaw

SARASOTA -- Don Juan is routing the Devil in George Bernard Shaw's debating society, Don Juan in Hell, now receiving an elegant staging from Banyan Theatre Company. Not only is V. Craig Heidenreich giving a swaggeringly confident performance as Don Juan, the libertine turned philosopher from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, but he has the most entertaining speeches. He also has the longest speeches.

For the last two-thirds of the intermissionless 90-minute play, the Devil (David Breitbarth) and his minions, the Spanish matron Dona Ana (Tessie Hogan) and her military commander father, known as the Statue (Bradford Wallace), can do little more than take their seats onstage, assume skeptical poses and let the torrent of talk from Don Juan wash over them.

Oh, the Devil gets his due in his famous "force of death" speech, and Breitbarth is suitably suave, sporting a snazzy goatee and white tie and tails. His hell is not a burning pit, but a cultured place devoted to contemplation of art and beauty.

Hogan's Ana, whose attempted seduction by the Don led to the murder of her father, is beautiful in black, as well as marvelously huffy about winding up in hell: "And I might have been so much wickeder! All my good deeds wasted!"

But heaven is not all it's cracked up to be. It's like a classical concert hall, her father says, "the most angelically dull place." Wallace's world-weary Statue should know, because he is the play's only emissary from heaven and wants to take out citizenship in hell.

Don Juan in Hell, the dream sequence from Act III of Man and Superman, is performed with the cast in evening dress and reading from scripts. This traditional format brings out the blazing best in Heidenreich, whose emphatic flipping of pages serves to drive home pungent points on things such as morality and marriage. "What is virtue but the trade unionism of marriage," he blusters.

It's all a bit of a sham, of course, because the notions that Shaw gives to Juan to spout off about -- up with the Superman and the Life Force, down with "the tedious, vulgar pursuit of happiness" -- sound increasingly dubious as the gab fest goes on. For all his brilliance, Shaw was a crackpot, but joyously, self-knowingly so, completely unconcerned where his love of ideas took him, no matter how outrageous.

Modern-day humbug such as political correctness would have been unthinkable to the fearless playwright and critic, and Banyan's fine production is a timely reminder how desperately the world needs a voice like his.

REVIEW: Don Juan in Hell by George Bernard Shaw has four shows through Sunday, Banyan Theatre Company in the Sainer Pavilion at New College of Florida, 5315 Bayshore Road, Sarasota. Tickets: $25. (941) 358-5330.

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