Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
When 18-year-old David Quicksall shipped out for a nine-month Navy cruise on the Pacific he took with him two fat books: the complete works of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes' 1,000-page novel "Don Quixote."
"I was a navigator," Quicksall says. "It's a demanding job. I read two or three plays. I got through maybe 60 pages of 'Don Quixote' and there the book stood on a shelf for years until this project came along."
"This project" is Book-It Repertory Theatre's stage adaptation of "Don Quixote," which opens tonight.
Quicksall, an actor/writer/director, is now 43. He made up his Shakespeare deficit by working at Shakespeare Santa Cruz while he was in college. Now he is regularly involved with the Seattle Shakespeare Company.
And over the past half-year he has steeped himself in "Don Quixote."
This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of "Don Quixote" (the sequel came out in 1615). The Book-It production is one of hundreds of events commemorating a momentous cultural phenomenon that has been called "the invention of the modern," "Western literature's first real novel" and "an archetype that prefigures all succeeding fiction."
Playwright/actor (and lifelong hispanophile) Anne Ludlum recommended "Don Quixote" to Book-It, a company that specializes in transforming on-the-page fiction into on-the-stage drama.
Book-It's co-artistic directors Jane Jones and Myra Platt liked the idea. They teamed Ludlum with Quicksall, a Book-It veteran whose previous adaptations include "Dracula," "If I Die in a Combat Zone" and "Travels With Charley."
"As it turned out," Quicksall says, "Annie and I were a sort of Don Quixote/Sancho Panza team. Sometimes I was Sancho and she was Quixote. And sometimes it was the other way around."
One of the archetypes found in Cervantes' novel is the odd-couple comic pair. Quixote is tall, thin and full of high-flown ideas and ideals. Sancho is short, fat, practical and hungry for food and wealth.
"I now think of my adaptation of John Steinbeck's 'Travels With Charley' as a warm-up for 'Don Quixote,' " Quicksall says. "Steinbeck would be Quixote. Charley (Steinbeck's dog) is Sancho. Steinbeck even called his truck 'Rocinante.' "
Don Quixote, who fancies himself a medieval knight errant bent on righting wrongs and defending the oppressed, leaves home in search of adventures riding on a broken-down horse called Rocinante -- a Spanish oxymoron that could be translated as Noble Nag. A knight needs a squire, and so Quixote recruits his neighbor Sancho, an illiterate farmer, for that position.
Sancho is hooked by the notion that knights have been known to reward their squires by making them governors of rich islands.
As things work out, Sancho actually does get to govern -- if not an island, then at least a village. This is one of the very few things that work out more or less as hoped for in the haphazard world of "Don Quixote." And, given the chance, Sancho turns out to be a notably wise and good public servant.
"Once you get into the dynamics of 'Don Quixote,' you see them everywhere," Quicksall says. "I've been reading 'Horton Hears a Who' to my 3 1/2-year-old daughter Maia. And I'm thinking, 'Horton is like Don Quixote. He is aware of something that no one else picks up on. They all think he's crazy.' "
To see more of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for online features, or to subscribe, go to http://seattlep-I.com.
© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All Rights Reserved.
