HK Magazine: “Don Juan in Chicago.” Do you sing “All that Jazz”?
Scott Sauer: No, we just use Chicago as a habitat. Don Juan makes a deal with the Devil, Mephistopheles, in 1599. He gets immortality, but has to sleep with a different woman every night. By the time we meet him, if you do the math, he’s slept with something like 148,000 women – so he’s a little bored of it by now. Chicago is just one of the cities that he inhabits; one of the cities that Don Juan, shall we say... copulates in.

HK: Are you a method actor? Doing preparation for Don Juan would be fun...
SS: Yes, I suppose I am, at times. The research was extremely fun – [grins] lots of late nights.

HK: Parts of the play are in rhyming couplets – is that easy to perform?
SS: There’s an interesting sort of music to the dialogue. It’s not difficult language, but the nature of farce is that it has to be fast. So everything has to happen quickly. These shows aren’t just rehearsed; they’re choreographed. It makes farce one of the most difficult forms of theatre.

HK: What can you promise us if we come to see it? Nudity and bawdry?
SS: Well, I prefer suggestion and innuendo, and there is certainly a lot of that. It’s a farce, very much oriented around slamming doors, illegitimate children, mistaken identities and copulation. It’s a little bit corny – not pantomime corny, but corny. There’s a lot of face-in-bosom, and a lot of, uh, “heated scenes.” With a comic twist.

HK: Okay. Casanova, James Bond and Don Juan in a three-way death match – who would win?
SS: Hmm... well for one, Don Juan’s immortal, so he’s got that going for him. But I say that they wouldn’t fight. They would sit down together and, most likely on Bond’s initiative, have tea. They discuss amorous techniques, the pathways of the Casanova. There’s no battle, just camaraderie.

HK: Johnny Depp made the movie, “Don Juan de Marco.” How do you think you compare? Could you beat him up?
SS: Well, Johnny Depp is a good actor. I’m a good actor as well... What can I say? If he and I were to have a duel to the death, I think we’d also have a cup of tea.