By Mike Hoban
Written by Octavio Solis, Directed by KJ Sanchez; Scenic Design, Takeshi Kata; Costume Design, Rachel Anne Healy; Lighting Design, Brian J. Lilienthal; Composer & Sound Design, David R Molina; Co-Composer, Eduardo Robledo; Music Director, Jesse Sanchez. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston through December 8
Quixote Nuevo, playwright Octavio Solis’ clever re-imagining of the Cervantes’ classic Don Quixote, now being staged at the Huntington Theatre, might well be described as giving a contemporary twist to a traditional “estofado” (stew). Taking many of the main ingredients from the original, Solis adds dashes of subject matter that give the story a more modern flavor, beefs up the comedy quotient, and in the process produces a palatable new offering, but one that may not be to every theatergoer’s taste. Equal parts comedy, love story, and social commentary, Quixote Nuevo is often wildly imaginative, but the items in the new recipe may not complement each other well enough to conjure up a classic new dish.
Set in the present day in the town of La Plancha, located at the Texas/Mexico border, Quixote Nuevo tells the story of Jose Quijano, a recently retired literature professor (played by long time “Sesame Street” character Luis – Emilio Delgado). Jose is having memory issues consistent with the middle stages of Alzheimer’s, as we see in a dream sequence where he is taunted by a host of calacas (colorful skeletal figures from Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations) over his memory loss, as well as scenes with his daughter Magdalena and niece that make his neurological deficits pretty clear. Magdalena, his priest and his psychiatrist all want to send him to an assisted living facility, while his niece wants to keep him at home and care for him. But he thwarts all plans when he escapes – flea market sword in hand – and begins his quest to find Dulcinea, his long lost love.
His search brings him to Rosario’s Lounge and Karaoke, a dive bar run by a Mexican-American family filled with colorful characters. After a night at the bar, he meets his Pancho Sanchez – Manny, an ice cream purveyor driving a pushcart powered by a bicycle – and the two set off on their own set of adventures. In this nuevo retelling, there are no windmills, but in their place there are border patrol agents, sheep and surveillance balloons that Jose and Pancho vanquish along the way, landing them in trouble with the law, specifically the Border Patrol. There’s also a backstory of the abuse suffered by Jose at the hands of his father, which includes forbidding him to see his true love Dulcinea, an undocumented Mexican girl that works for his father. And the calacas that haunted him early in the play – particularly Papa Calacas – continue to show up throughout his journey, keeping the line between reality and illusion a fuzzy one.
Solis also ramps up the comic elements, and while some of it is effective, other times the bits feel more like devices than an organic part of the script. In one scene where they discuss “breaking through the wall” (metaphorically), Manny does an impression of Jim Morrison singing “Break on Through to the Other Side” that just feels as if it was designed for a cheap laugh. But not everything is played for laughs, as we see in a powerful scene where a man who has come to this country seeking asylum is lost in the desert, his family having died during the journey. It is beautifully written and performed, but again, seems more like a statement on the horrifying state of U.S. border policy than part of the story. If all this sounds like a lot to jam into one play, it is. There’s no doubting Solis skills as a writer and storyteller, but it’s his editing that may need a little work. The characters of the priest and a psychiatrist for instance, are fairly wooden caricatures, and seem as if they were included as commentary on how religion and medicine don’t fully comprehend the human spirit (or something), but they’re so underdeveloped, they don’t serve any real purpose.
What Solis does achieve however, is a lively updating of the story for today’s audiences (which hopefully will become younger and more diverse if theater is to survive), and for the most part, there’s a lot of fun to be had amid the more serious and despairing passages involving memory loss, end of life issues and immigration policy. He infuses the dialogue with heavy doses of Spanish phrases and Chicano slang to add color to the language, but not so much that it interferes with English-only speakers ability to understand what’s going on. The performances are uniformly good, especially Delgado’s, which alternates between bravado and vulnerability, and he radiates the goodness that the character requires. As his sidekick Manny, Juan Manuel Amador has some terrific comic moments, including a scene involving the pickled finger of Pancho Villa that is alternately hilarious and disgusting. The ensemble is first rate, and features a standout performance by Krystal Hernandez, who was so impressive last winter in Company One’s Miss You Like Hell at Oberon. Updating a classic is tricky business, and while Quixote Nuevo is unlikely to reach the kind of iconic status of that earlier re-working of Cervantes’ novel, Man of La Mancha, it’s still a likeable production and well worth seeing. For tickets and information, go to: https://www.huntingtontheatre.org
