State Of The Arts: ‘Quixote’ At Shakespeare Dallas

JWYes, a lot. And yet – no.

Cervantes’ novel from 1615 sprawls; it was originally published as two books. It’s akin to a picaresque novel, meaning it doesn’t build a traditional narrative arc that rises and develops. Instead, it follows one character along a string of episodes. ‘Don Quixote’ also manages to be incredibly complex and layered, with stories-within-stories. We’re at the very beginnings of the modern European novel, and here’s Cervantes playing self-referential games and undermining the author’s authority like the hippest, lit-crit-heavy, post-modernist wise guy.

So any adaptor has to choose which of the many episodes to use, which trail to take to hack through this forest. With Octavio Solis’ version, you’ll see events that I don’t think any other treatment has really presented. Even so, most of the episodes tend to follow the familiar comic line. Don Quixote read so many books about knights and castles, he goes out to uphold the traditions of chivalry. He foolishly wanders around with his sadsack squire, Sancho Panza, believing ordinary folks are enemy knights or they’re captive maidens he must save. As a result, he and Sancho are chased away or beaten or trapped, over and over.

JWThat’s one, pretty common interpretation. But Cervantes was mocking those old tales Quixote believed. It was like someone today believing in superhero movies.

At any rate, when ‘Quixote,’ the play, premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2009, it was done as a traditional period piece. It was set in the 1600s. But Shakespeare Dallas won a grant to commission Octavio Solis to re-write that first version. Director Gustavo Tambascio had the idea of updating the staging, setting it in Texas along the border.

JWWell, kudos to Shakespeare Dallas for trying something different. Much of it’s amusing and clever – better than the many ‘Old West’ stagings of Shakespeare I’ve sat through. Here, Quixote doesn’t ride an old horse, he drives a mobility scooter. Sancho Panza doesn’t have a donkey; he has a paleta cart, one of those fruitcicle carts vendors push.

And when Quixote goes tilting at windmills, they are windmills but they’re Texas ranch-style windmills. There are also musical numbers, which I suspect weren’t in Solis’ original version because they feature female mariachi dancers and boot-scooting in a country-western bar.

But here’s an example of Solis’ slyer updatings. The local priest argues the cure for Quixote is burning his books.

JWYeah, and Solis makes ‘Quixote’ politically relevant as well. Some people may think, ‘Great, another writer inserting contemporary political lectures where they’re not needed.’ But as modern readers, we miss a lot of the social satire that’s actually in Cervantes’ novel. We don’t catch the nudging and the winking. But obviously, we just heard Cervantes mocking censorship by the Catholic Church.

In that regard, the novel really becomes something of a debate over the value of fiction – with Cervantes playing both sides, knight vs. windmill. Did those old novels inspire Quixote or just delude him? Can a novel provide worthy guidance? But if fiction’s a fraud, shouldn’t it be banned?

So – a little sociopolitical viewpoint is not out of place onstage. There’s a grand, dramatic clash I won’t give away. It’s not in the novel but it’s timely and even moving.  And this is Jim Jorgensen as Quixote, imploring Dulcinea, his imaginary queen, his inspiration, to give him strength.

JWYeah, and for another thing, Jorgensen is really good as Quixote. He’s noble and driven – and clueless. I remember seeing him 25 years ago, soon after he graduated from SMU. These days, he’s mastered the kind of weary majesty that comes with age, an essential ingredient for Quixote. But he’s not afraid to look foolish.  

JWA big hurdle in adapting the novel ‘Don Quixote’ is Cervantes’ own voice. He’s the narrator. He interrupts, he dawdles, he makes deadpan comments, he apologizes with ornate courtesy, he wrings his hands. To convey that voice, Solis turns Cervantes into a character onstage, played by David Goodwin. And this Cervantes brings his Quixote into the future, to us, to test the old hidalgo. But then as the play continues, Cervantes repeatedly pops back in as different minor characters.

JWYeah. I understand why Solis did it but I don’t think the device works. It might have worked if it were played for laughs, at least sometimes. Or perhaps if it were done like a faux-solemn movie voice-over – only with the characters onstage occasionally objecting to this voice from the sky. But Goodwin’s Cervantes is stone-solid serious, even melancholy.

And the character of Cervantes only adds to a play that’s already too long. Musical numbers, for instance, are supposed to kick life into a show; at the same time, the songs express emotions the characters can’t express other than by getting out the dance shoes and belting out a number. But the big dance numbers feel kind of conveniently stuck in here – as if they’re the sort of lively, playful artifice Cervantes would have used if Broadway existed in 1615. They don’t really forward the storyline or deepen any particular character – beyond bits of music like the lovely guitar underscoring Quixote’s plea.

Anthony Ramirez, as Sancho, brings his characteristic noisy fun to the proceedings. He may be the first local performer to act while getting tossed into the air on a blanket (a bizarre scene that actually is in the novel). But all that comic energy loses some of Sancho’s Eeyore-ish qualities. Sancho has always been the glum, reality principle against Quixote’s heedless fantasies, the earth to the Don’s air. Sancho’s hungry, he’s tired, he’s henpecked, he doesn’t know from knights and the only reasons he’s suffering through all this is his smidgen of loyalty and affection for the old guy but mostly for the big payoff Quixote promised him.

For all his welcome energy, Ramirez and his paleta cart spin their wheels. Nothing he does – or Marcus Stimac, too, as a bullying innkeeper – makes the play go any faster, gain real life. Shakespeare’s dramas can certainly run two and a half hours, and Cervantes’ novel, as I noted, sprawls all over the place as well. But ‘Quixote’ feels too long partly because it seems to be wrapping up several times – and disappoints us. When the Cervantes character finally announces he knows how to resolve things, we’ve been checking our watches for 15 minutes.

JWSolis’ script is smarter, more sophisticated than the musical ‘Man of La Mancha’ or most movie treatments. It fearlessly interweaves the ‘Cardenio’ love triangle, for instance. Quixote and Sancho learn that story from a miserable man they come across in the wilderness. It’s also a story that Shakespeare picked up from Cervantes for his ‘lost’ play, ‘Cardenio.’ So one wonders if Solis is playing on that Shakespearean connection as well. Or does he simply want to complicate Quixote’s storyline, preventing it from being one beatdown after another as don stumbles along from town to town.

By the end, Solis’ play – at least under Tambuscio’s direction – seems to fall somewhere halfway between his first traditional version and a fully realized updating/adapting. The seemingly scavenged, tossed-together nature of the production (set design by Michael Sullivan, costume design by Claudia Stephens) can delight  – the way, for example, Jorgensen’s outfit includes safety kneepads, longjohn underwear and the old-guy-well-past-caring use of socks with sandals. But why is the La Mancha town barber still a barber and a surgeon – which was true for 1605 but makes little sense today and has little purpose here? Why keep Quixote’s barber’s bowl for a helmet – a tonsorial tool that no one’s used in decades? Why get traditional now? Why not a Home Depot bucket or an aluminum mixing bowl?

This sometimes-clever, sometimes-clunky quality marks the show from the very start: I don’t think you need to have Miguel Cervantes come onstage and invoke seven dancing muses to justify magically transporting Quixote to Texas. Just bring Quixote here, and let the old knight and his sweet, sad sidekick win our hearts all over again.