Dawn, Quixote at The Building Stage
★★★☆☆
The Building Stage. Conceived and dir. Blake Montgomery. With ensemble cast. 1hr 35mins; no intermission.
The hero of Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century epic famously and foolishly imagines himself a chivalric knight-errant who sees inns as castles to be conquered and windmills as angry giants to battle. Accompanied by simple but loyal sidekick Sancho Panza, Don Quixote sets out to right wrongs, but his efforts are met with bemusement or derision. Director Blake Montgomery and his cast use a familiar Building Stage tactic in their devised adaptation: The ensemble members perform as a collective, sharing and trading roles with a fluid flair. In this case, the three male and three female actors’ baseline personas are iterations of Quixote, clad in roughly matching black pantaloons, gray wigs and bushy fake beards and projecting a gung-ho sense of purpose while strumming ukuleles.
The Building Stage has designated Dawn, Quixote its final production, after which it will close up shop at its unfortunately secluded West Town home. Cervantes’s impossible dreamer makes a wistful mascot for the troupe’s terminus, on a set created from shelves stacked high, thrift-shop style, with relics from past productions. The cheeky, spaghetti- Western-flavored retelling can feel a bit thin and more than a little repetitious. Its goofy meandering is no match for the company’s sweeping, marathon riff on The Ring Cycle or its dynamic encapsulation of Moby-Dick.
Yet Montgomery and company’s climactic confrontation with Cervantes’s decisive conclusion (in which the protagonist is shaken out of his madness, settles down and undramatically dies) plays a moving metatheatrical card. These men and women of La Mancha rewrite that ending. In their cheery, closing uke rendition of “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” they suggest that closing a chapter doesn’t have to mean giving up on a dream.
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