¡Quijóteres! (2023)
A bilingual, shadow puppet adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’ lovable lunatic, Don Quijote de La Mancha.
As a work interpreted by shadow puppets, it takes full advantage of imaginative settings and scenarios to emphasize the novel’s intensely comical depiction of the ridiculous, with all the clashes and crashes, valor and vomit, that have distinguished the Quijote as a funny book for more than four centuries.
THE PLAY
¡QUIJÓTERES! is a 45-minute, bilingual play representing just a few threads teased out from the countless, tangled, intertwined stories depicted in Cervantes’s classic tale. Featured episodes include Don Quijote’s preparations as a knight, his first introduction to Sancho Panza, his battles against armies and giants, various interactions with Sansón Carrasco (an intertextual fan of the novel), and even a metatheatrical puppet show within a puppet show staged by the novel’s own renowned puppeteer, Maese Pedro.
Though reducing a nearly 1,000-page novel requires a truly Alexandrian amount of cutting, the resulting text strives to remain faithful, if not identical, to the core values and spirit of the original.
THE AUDIENCE
The play aims to serve two kinds of audiences:
First, it imagines an audience of YOUNG CHILDREN, perhaps in an elementary school setting, with kids who do not understand Spanish and possess little to no familiarity with the Quijote. For this group, the play offers an engaging, comical, action-driven introduction to Spanish and to Cervantes’s misguided knight that encourages them to want to learn more.
The second envisions an audience of STUDENTS AND SCHOLARS at the university level who speak Spanish and wield a firm enough understanding of the Quijote to recognize subtle references to events and characters detailed in the novel. For this group the play aims to highlight the beauty and flavor of the original language, certain nuances of the characters and their relationships, and some of the narrative innovations frequently cited as evidence of the book’s renown as the first modern novel.
THE CHARACTERS
The performance features nearly 50 professionally designed, 3D-printed, and articulated shadow puppets—including monsters and windmills, sheep and soldiers, props and peasants—as well as multiple iterations of the play’s primary characters:
DON QUIJOTE, depicted in varying states of victory and defeat along his heroic journey;
SANCHO PANZA, Don Quijote’s squire and travelling companion;
CERVANTES, the novel’s author and sometimes antagonist;
SANSÓN CARRASCO, an intertextual fan of the novel, later disguised as a puppeteer.
THE SCENERY
Nearly twenty different backgrounds provide a wide range of unique settings across the La Mancha countryside. These images were created to resemble a “scrapbook” style by digitally “tearing” and colorizing pages from the early print edition of the novel. As a further homage to the play’s literary roots, “clouds” in the sky display the novel’s original chapter headings corresponding to the action representation in that moment of the performance.
THE IMAGINATION
The play takes full advantage of dynamic visual strategies unique to shadow puppetry to engage the eyes as well as the mind. This is particularly effective during “transformation” scenes that move back-and-forth between the real world and Don Quijote’s imagination, such as a flock of sheep morphing into a field of armies in battle, or simple windmills twisting into tentacled giants.
One of the most curious episodes in the novel provides an especially exciting and multi-layered moment in the play when Don Quijote encounters the travelling puppeteer Maese Pedro and shifts into the role of audience member, first viewing and later dramatically interfering with a puppet show within the puppet show.
THE REVIEWS
See what audience members—including many scholars of early modern literature and theatre—have said about the show!