Man of La Mancha

Content Warning: This play romanticizes mental health conditions and uses terminology that reinforces the stigma around them.

Written in the early 17th century, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1615) is one of the best-known works of Spanish literature. The English language even adopted a new word from the eponymous protagonist: “quixotic,” an adjective describing a person or project that is excessively idealistic and therefore likely to fail. The word simultaneously evokes admiration for the idealism and pity for the person’s deluded hopes. Cervantes’s characterization of Don Quixote contains that same ambiguity, and that is part of what inspired Dale Wasserman’s Man of La Mancha three centuries later.

Though sometimes called the first modern novel, Don Quixote drew on a number of previous genres of fiction. Most importantly, Cervantes satirized many of the tropes of late medieval chivalric romances. These chivalric stories narrated a glorified world of knights who performed amazing feats of arms in service of a noble lady, adhering to a strict code of honor. Sorcerers, giants, enchantments, and other fantastical elements created conflicts that the hero had to resolve. Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a minor noble who reads these romances and develops the delusion that he is one of these fictional heroes. Despite being feeble and ill-suited for any type of physical adventure, Don Quixote goes forth after recruiting Sancho Panza, a simpleminded peasant, as his squire and reimagining an ill-tempered local woman as his delicate princess Dulcinea. Don Quixote insistently tries to fit the real world into the tropes of chivalry, most famously believing that a windmill is really a four-armed giant and attacking it, only to be swept off his horse by the windmill’s sails.

While Man of La Mancha draws heavily on the characters of Don Quixote and its sharp critique of injustice, Wasserman insists that his musical is not an adaptation of the book—he found the book too broad and the language inimitable. The story of Cervantes, however, captivated him. Cervantes’s life was a “catalogue of catastrophe” (vii), including impoverishment, imprisonment, and poor reviews of his plays, yet he produced this classic work amid his problems. A remark in Cervantes’s preface to Don Quixote about the power of prison to liberate the imagination has prompted speculation that he conceived the idea for his novel during his imprisonment in 1597. Wasserman’s Man of La Mancha captures the resilience of Cervantes’s creative spirit in that dark period by blending a fictionalized version of his imprisonment with a retelling of Cervantes’s characters that heightens their idealism.

Wasserman makes two significant changes concerning Cervantes’s actual 1597 imprisonment. First, he pretends that Cervantes had almost completed Don Quixote prior to prison instead of just beginning to create the novel’s premise. This allows Wasserman to have Cervantes tell his story of the idealistic knight’s struggle while undergoing his own period of trial. Second, Wasserman makes Cervantes’s jailers the Spanish Inquisition rather than the secular authorities who historically imprisoned him. His characterization of Cervantes challenging authority through his creation of the equally idealistic character Don Quixote reflects Wasserman’s commitment to critiquing injustice through storytelling, remaining true to Cervantes’s original goals.