📅 Friday, January 19th – Sunday, February 11th
📍 Seattle Rep’s Bagley Wright Theater: 155 Mercer St, Seattle
🎟 $20+
Retired literature professor Jose Quijano (Herbert Siguenza) lives along the Mexico-Texas border with his sister and niece, his heyday of being a Miguel de Cervantes scholar long behind him. But just because he can no longer teach the story of Don Quixote de La Mancha, that doesn’t mean he can’t become him. With dementia just around the corner and his family insistent on putting him in an assisted living facility, Jose escapes from home and his suffocating life, deputizes his ice cream seller neighbor Manny (Ernie González Jr.) to be his squire and ventures south in a tricycle adorned with the skull of his mother’s favorite horse. Along the way, he will tilt at windmills, come across dastardly villains, and try to find his Dulcinea, a deported migrant worker he met as a child. This is his quest.
Quixote Nuevo, written by Octavio Solis and produced in association with Portland Center Stage and South Coast Repertory Theatre, is years in the making. Along with the upcoming POC Shakespeare adaptation Fat Ham (coming in April-May), it’s another welcome effort for Seattle Rep and artistic director Dámaso Rodríguez to expand their programming and reach a more diverse audience. And a version of Don Quixote, updated to a modern world of border agents, immigration woes, chock-full of Tejano music and awe-inspiring puppetry, is just the shot in the arm 21st-century theatre needs.
Note: The February 3rd and 11th productions will be presented with Spanish-language open captions.
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