Octavio Solis’s Quixote Nuevo certainly qualifies as a national theatrical event. It was born at Oregon Shakespeare Festival a decade ago; was rewritten and premiered at California Shakespeare Theater; and now plays under the aegis of Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, bookended by engagements at Hartford Stage (this past fall) and Houston’s Alley Theatre (in the new year). Coast-to-coast appeal is understandable given Solis’s growing reputation, not to mention Americans’ interest in Latinx culture and art generally and, of course, recent and ongoing events at the Texas/Mexico border where this updating of Cervantes is set. KJ Sanchez’s aggressively bilingual production is splashy and colorful and carries considerable power, although falling short of some of the impact to which it aspires.
Solis’s narrative pretty much follows the familiar Man of La Mancha playbook supplemented by modern/Western Hemisphere touchpoints. So the frail, doddering “Jose Quijano” (Emilio Delgado) is now a retired literature professor living in “La Plancha,” Texas, his escape into the mindset of Don Quixote aboard his “steed” Rosinante—a daffy three-wheeler—motivated by his family’s effort to consign him to an assisted living facility in light of worsening dementia. From there, the expected set-pieces trot along. There’s the dubbing into knighthood at a wayside cantina; an unlikely helmet (here, a bedpan); and the battle with a giant beast, here a Border Patrol scanning balloon, which the Don’s sword downs for the act one cliffhanger.
Dulcinea—our hero’s famously obscure object of desire—is shrewdly rendered as a real lost love from whom Jose was rudely separated in their youth. Flashbacks to their early lives, touchingly played by Gisela Chípe and Ivan Jasso, lend greater immediacy to Quixote’s impossible dream of reuniting with her in the here and now.
Narrative innovations aside, there’s no flagging of the 400-year-old appeal of an idealistic holy fool risking all to confront mankind’s baseness and stupidity head-on. And Quixote Nuevo enjoys a secret ingredient in the audience’s love affair with Delgado, born of 44 years’ starring as “Luis” on Sesame Street. Whether you saw him occasionally or grew up with him, you root for him, he makes you smile. (I wish Juan Manuel Amador made me smile let alone laugh as Manny, the ice cream vendor whom the Don takes as Sancho Panza, but his broad, pull-out-all-stops mugging left me cold.)
Not all of the stagecraft persuades. The Alzheimer’s element seems shoehorned in, with Delgado given no opportunities to drift in and out of rationality. (Indeed, the actor’s evident line trouble on opening night worked against full belief in the character’s dysfunction and undercut his moments of strength.) At the same time, the Quijano family members are sadly underwritten and their scenes just lie there, inert and dull. They’re types rather than individuals, particularly Juana, Manny’s wife; surely Solis and Sanchez could have given Krystal Hernandez more to do than bray her way through two hours. Fussy staging of group scenes gets in the way of the story arc impelling our hero into his lonely desert destiny.
While too often lax and meandering, Quixote Nuevo keeps striking at the heart in unexpected moments: the flashbacks for instance, and the danses macabre of the “Calacas,” skeleton figures who accompany Quixote under black light (designer Brian J. Lillienthal doing yeoman work) to recall his, and our own, ultimate destiny. David R. Molina and Eduardo Robledo’s evocation of the music of the Southwest, directed by Jesse Sanchez, is compelling throughout.
And there was no single element I appreciated more than Orlando Arriaga as Cardenio, an undocumented Salvadoran whose family has died along the road to the U.S. land of promise, leaving him half-mad in a desert canyon (one of Takeshi Kata’s most effective sets). At once, eloquent dialogue from Solis, tender playing by Arriaga and Delgado, our knowledge of what’s happening right now on our border, and Cervantes’ rueful understanding of universal human frailty come together in a trenchant tableau of grief. It points to the potential—but as yet unfulfilled—power of Quixote Nuevo.
