A new 'Don Quixote' lights up the OSF stage

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George Bernard Shaw could have been thinking of Don Quixote when he said that courage will not save you, but it will show that your soul is alive. The deluded hidalgo from La Mancha is ridiculous and probably beyond saving, but he is brave.

Octavio Solis's adaptation "Don Quixote de La Mancha," directed by Laird Williamson, is just your basic little retro-Iberian, phantasmagorical, provincial, picaresque chivalry spoof, in English, with puppets. It opened Saturday night on the OSF's Elizabethan stage.

There have been many attempts to bring to the stage Cervantes' masterpiece. None worked (Dale Wasserman's "Man of La Mancha" is not properly speaking a dramatization of the novel). Until now. It's not hard to see why. Nobody sees this mock history/adventure/satire/psychological study-cum-picaresque farce quite the same. As Williamson suggests in his program notes, the project must have been like herding cats.

An avatar of Cervantes (Jeffrey King), acting as a narrator, begins the story of a 50-something dreamer from La Mancha, which was like the Malheur County of Renaissance Spain. Don Quixote (Armando Duran), aka Alonso Quixano, has a scary encounter with a shadowy figure called The Enchanter (a giant puppet voiced by David DeSantos). Fortunately, he was dreaming. Wasn't he?

"Is this life really mine?" he asks.

Alonso is weary of a meaningless life in retirement on a hardscrabble estate. He's been living for the chivalrous romances he reads, even selling off pieces of property to buy books of knightly derring-do. His niece (Mariko Nakasone, his housekeeper (Dee Maaske), a priest (John Pribyl) and a barber (Mark Murphey) try to snap him out of it by burning most of his books.

"Fiction is a terrible crime," says Father Perez.

People even look to fiction for moral instruction. Maybe even to "Cardenio," a book by "Cervantes" that shows up in Alonso's library.

Alonso declares himself Don Quixote, names a skinny old nag Rocinante, rounds up some cheesy armor and sets out as a knight-errant to right the wrongs of the world. He is inspired by the beautiful damsel Dulcinea, as he renames a farm girl who never appears, and joined by the dull-witted Sancho Panza (Josiah Phillips), a farmer to whom he promises an insula, his own island.

The pair have a series of comic misadventures predicated on Don Quixote's misreading of virtually everything. They mess with our whole idea of narrative. They get beaten up a lot.

We meet the denizens of a rowdy country inn where, in a drunken burlesque, Don Quixote is dubbed a knight. The sheep he mistakes for armies. The convicts he liberates.

If we could summon them back, would these characters report seeing the same middle-aged lunatic? Or would each, like the characters in Solis's musical fable "The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy," have seen something different, underscoring the elusiveness of the line between fantasy and reality?

All this is laugh-out-loud funny, and it's played broadly. Some of the humor stems from situations, as when a barfly at the inn slips into Don Quixote's bed in the dark (in a variation of the "bed trick" popular in Shakespeare and elsewhere), thinking him to be The Traveler, another manifestation of the Avatar.

Other times the humor comes from character, in particular the contrast between the idealistic but deranged Don Quixote and the plodding but sensible Sancho Panza. Phillips has a way of looking at Duran and simply shaking his head.

Central to the play's stagecraft are the many puppets created by Lynn Jeffries of Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles. Rocinante is played by James Jesse Peck (anterior) and Anna-Lisa Chacon (posterior), who actually display varying gaits. Sancho Panza's donkey, Dapple, is a puppet, as are sheep, vultures, an owl, geese and in one funny bit, Sancho himself. A deft moment of shadow puppetry serves as the culmination of Don Quixote's famous encounter with the windmills and ends the first act.

When he wrote "Don Quixote," Cervantes made up the story that it was a manuscript by the (made-up) Moorish historian Cide Hamete Benengeli. That made it a big story inside a little story, much as "The Taming of the Shrew" is contained within its induction. In the same spirt, Solis's Avatar character represents Cervantes himself, moving in and out of the story seeminly at will.

This blurs the mimesis, the action we see on the stage, with a diegetic level on which somebody seems to be telling us a story. In another instance, "Cardenio" first appears as a book by Cervantes in Alonzo/Don Quixote's world. Then he starts showing up in the narrative (played by Danforth Comins), pursuing his love, Lucinda (Vilma Silva), who has married another, or maybe not.

"Why do they pop up like this?" Phillips deadpans.

Solis and company have herded only the first of Cervantes' two Quixote books onto the stage, the one without the darkness. It contains of necessity only parts of the whole, but they are chosen and realized here to brilliant effect, funny with hints of something profound. It is brilliant theater.

The absurd Don Quixote has a certain dignity as he passionately pursues his ideals without wavering. He must fail, since he is rebelling against time itself, but he never wavers. If he goes down in flames, there is splendor in the ashes. In the end the Avatar promises Don Quixote he will believe in Dulcinea. We don't know if he's telling the truth.

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