by J. Cooper Robb

New Paradise Laboratories' Don Juan in Nirvana is a sensational work of art. It's exceptional, extremely interesting, highlights scandalous and lurid events, and manipulates sensory impressions. But if Don Juan didn't do all these things, it wouldn't be a production by New Paradise, a company so gifted and daring that its productions often leave theatergoers awestruck, baffled and infuriated.

Filled with sexual bravado, Don Juan is structured as a play within a play. This isn't a particularly odd construction, but what's unusual is that here it's the exterior work that's more mysterious.

Not that the interior play is lacking in moments of inscrutability or strangeness. Led by a tyrannical theater director named Landis (William Zielinski), a troupe of seven actors rehearses scenes for a new work, which, according to Landis, was inspired by God.

Like the title character in Molière's 17th-century satire, Landis is a vain, hypocritical man with an unquenchable thirst for power. And also like that legendary romantic brigand, he's obsessed with matters of the flesh.

In Molière's tale Don Juan pretends to become religious. Likewise, Landis--who once toiled as an arms dealer and believes himself to be a reincarnation of the famous lover--has been reborn as a sort of writer/director/ evangelist. And like Don Juan, he's a fake.

The dictatorial, alcoholic director believes himself to be in command of his universe--he even goes so far as to tempt his fragile sobriety by keeping a bottle of whisky in front of him. But in reality, the actors--who seem to represent a mysterious higher power of some kind--exert influence on the world of the play.

New Paradise artistic director Whit MacLaughlin's production is a jumble of visual splendor and mostly sexual excesses. In one scene Landis tells one of the performers who's happily sodomizing the eager director to either shoot him or kiss him.

There are many dramaturgical influences affecting the work--Molière's play, the wri-tings of Wilhelm Reich and paintings of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Henry Darger, Buddhist teachings, even the songs of Kurt Cobain--and the piece, though unified, lacks a dominating point of view. Still, the acting is generally superb and the fight choreography amazing, and both Mark O'Maley's lighting design and MacLaughlin's soundscape are penetrating and provocative.

As always, New Paradise avoids simple interpretation. Just as we think MacLaughlin has unleashed Molière (who was severely restricted by the censors of his time) from the bounds of 17th-century aristocracy and given us the Don Juan the playwright would have liked to have written, the production goes in another direction.

It's perhaps too simple to consider Nirvana an examination of the moral, ethical and political neutrality associated with apocalyptic certainty (a concept Landis is deeply enamored with). Unlike Molière's Don Juan, which punishes the protagonist for his past digressions in a conclusion that's moralistically contrived, Nirvana rejects tidy resolution.

The production alludes to a variety of theories regarding the afterlife, pre-tribulation rapture and the second coming. But in Nirvana only the here and now is significant. And even then, nothing's for certain.