46 pages • 1 hour read
Dale WassermanMan of La Mancha
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Musical Numbers 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Musical Number 1a Summary: “Prison Scene”
The play opens with a stage that represents the common room where prisoners—mostly “thieves and murderers” (5)—gather as they await trial. A ramp lowers and the officers of the Inquisition escort Cervantes and his servant into the prison with a chest containing their possessions. The prisoners attack Cervantes to rob him until their leader, the Governor, calls them off temporarily to allow Cervantes to introduce himself as a gentleman, a poet, a playwright, and an actor. When asked if being a poet is now a crime, Cervantes admits he also had a side job as a tax collector. The Inquisition has imprisoned him for attempting to foreclose on a church, which Cervantes did since he insists the law needs to apply equally to every person and institution.
The Governor informs Cervantes that every prisoner is tried by his fellow prisoners, found guilty, and fined all his possessions. After a brief resistance, Cervantes resigns himself to the loss of his props and costumes, but leaps to the defense of a bundle of papers that the Governor is about to burn. This bundle, the audience will later learn, is the manuscript for Don Quixote. To defend his work, Cervantes demands a full trial from his fellow prisoners. The Duke, another prisoner who is disgusted by Cervantes’s foolish dedication to principle, steps forward to accuse him of being “an idealist, a bad poet, and an honest man” (9).
Cervantes pleads guilty but suggests that the court is obligated to let him make an argument for leniency. The Governor, intrigued and with nothing else to do in prison, allows Cervantes to go ahead over the Duke’s protests. Cervantes says his defense will take the form of an entertainment in which the prisoners will have to play the different parts.
Musical Number 1b Summary: “Man of La Mancha”
As Cervantes uses a handful of props to transform the foreboding prison into a stage and himself into his play’s main character, Don Quixote, he switches from speech into song. This first musical number introduces Alonso Quijana, a minor gentleman, who feels overwhelmed and angered by the evils of the world and so “lays down the melancholy burden of sanity” (11). He develops the delusion that he is Don Quixote, a knight-errant based on the books of chivalric romances that he reads. He sets out on a quest to fight oppression.
Cervantes’s servant also joins the song as he adopts the costume of Sancho, Don Quixote’s squire. Their voices blend as they proclaim their desire to follow chivalric destiny (for the knight) and his master (for the squire).
Musical Number 2 Summary: “The Enchanter”
Don Quixote and Sancho travel down the road. Don Quixote outlines a fantastic vision of a world filled with knights, ladies, giants, magic, and his nemesis, “the Enchanter.” A confused Sancho wishes to accept what his lord says but keeps remarking that he only sees ordinary things like the road he’s traveled many times to market. Don Quixote dismisses Sancho’s concerns, even as they confront what the former proclaims to be a huge ogre with four twirling arms while the latter frantically asserts it is merely a windmill. Don Quixote attacks the (offstage) enemy and his helmet comes flying back, followed by a battered, crawling Don Quixote.
Don Quixote admits his ogre is indeed now a windmill but insists that his enemy, the Enchanter, transformed himself at the last minute to deprive the knight of glory from the battle. Don Quixote determines he is vulnerable to that magic because he has never been properly dubbed a knight. Fortunately, he sees a magnificent castle in the distance whose lord could surely dub him. Sancho hesitates, saying he can see only an inn of the type filled by rough, dangerous people. Don Quixote shakes his head sadly and urges his squire to go forward with him to see the building accurately.
Musical Number 3 Summary: “It's All the Same”
Cervantes steps out of the character for a moment. He echoes Don Quixote’s earlier words about perception, saying that to different people the same thing may appear differently: “To someone else, whatever his mind may make of it” (17). He tells his prisoner audience that he will accept Sancho’s interpretation for now and drafts the prisoners to play the unruly muleteers of the inn, with the Governor taking the role of innkeeper and a female prisoner playing his wife. Finally, he selects another woman to take the role of Aldonza as the music swells and indicates a return to Cervantes’s play.
Aldonza enters to serve the muleteers food as they make lewd passes at her and she responds with ribald rebuttals. They sing that they “come to Aldonza for love” (19) and she scoffs, singing in reply that every man is the same. Despite their protestations and talk of love, she says that all men end up the same in the dark as they seek their own pleasure without any care for her. She has learned that sex is a simple transaction: “Just put your money in my hand / And you will get what money buys!” (19). She sleeps with hatred burning inside of her for these men and for her life but takes pride in at least deciding to whom she will give herself. In the end, she accepts money from Pedro, the muleteer’s leader, with the implication it is an advance payment for sex later.
As the innkeeper enters, a bugle blows. They are flabbergasted to see Don Quixote and Sancho enter. The two proclaim the knight’s quest to defend the right and request hospitality in flowery language from the “lord” of the “castle.” The innkeeper manages to overcome his shock to welcome the knight despite his wife’s warning that he is taking in a “madman.”
Musical Number 4 Summary: “Dulcinea”
As Don Quixote asks whether anyone has a quest for him, Aldonza reenters the room. Don Quixote stares at her and calls her “sweet lady…fair virgin” (22). He says she is too beautiful to look at and begs the favor of knowing her name. Aldonza answers him curtly and tries to move past the strange man, just as she dismissed the muleteers earlier.
Don Quixote, however, asserts that Aldonza is too common of a name for her and that his lady must be testing him. He will not fail her, he gently says. Don Quixote then begins to sing his love for his lady and the sweetness of what he believes to be her true name: Dulcinea. He proclaims that he truly loves and honors her despite never having seen her before this moment.
When the innkeeper takes Don Quixote to his room, the muleteers jump in with a parody of the song. Aldonza, in a fury, drives them off, ending the scene. The lights abruptly shift, signaling a return to the prison setting as the Duke shouts. He angrily insists that Cervantes’s playacting is no defense, but rather, an attempt to divert them. Cervantes mischievously agrees, playing on the double meaning of the word ”divert” (both to entertain and to distract), and the Governor orders the play to continue.
Musical Number 5 Summary: “I'm Only Thinking of Him”
Cervantes introduces the final set of characters in his play: four people from Don Quixote’s home village concerned about his mental health. The play returns with two women in a confessional singing to a priest (the “Padre”). They proclaim they are only thinking of the knight’s well-being, as the song’s title says, but the title is ironic: Each has a predominately selfish motive. His niece, Antonia, worries her fiancé will renounce her because of the scandal of having a “mad” uncle. His unnamed housekeeper hopes that Don Quixote will mistake her for his lady-love and she’ll be “forced” to marry him for the sake of decency.
Antonia’s worries are well-founded. Cervantes has persuaded the Duke to take on the role of her fiancé, Dr. Sansón Carrasco, whose realism and skepticism mirror the Duke’s own outlook. Dr. Carrasco is indeed ready to disown Antonia to avoid an embarrassing connection to a “lunatic.” The Padre tries to convince him that Don Quixote is simply carried away by harmless imagination. When Dr. Carrasco angrily rejects the Padre’s opinion as uneducated, the Padre instead slyly appeals to Dr. Carrasco’s pride, suggesting that the doctor who could “cure” Don Quixote would be famous. Dr. Carrasco takes the bait and agrees to follow after his potential uncle-in-law. Like Antonia and the housekeeper, Dr. Carrasco proclaims he acts selflessly, “only thinking of him” (31).
Musical Numbers 1-5 Analysis
Wasserman builds his story around the play-within-a-play trope. The interior play progresses from something rather basic to being as, or even more, poignant and significant than the real frame. This evolution is key to the theme of The Transformative Power of the Imagination.
Wasserman’s directions on staging emphasize that the only “real” setting is the prison, with its rough furniture and the props that Cervantes brings with him. They also specifically say that Cervantes demonstrates “a childish delight in play-acting” (4) despite being a trained actor. The initial interior play has this amateur feel. The props are basic, the “horses” are prisoners playing horse like a parent with a child, and the humor of a “mad” old man being thrown across the stage by foolishly attacking a building could be seen as a rather juvenile kind of slapstick humor. During these initial scenes, most of the prisoners serve as an onstage audience who laugh and respond to Cervantes’s antics. When the Duke challenges Cervantes’s acting as a mere “diversion,” his characterization of it seems justified.
However, the prisoners are soon literally drawn into Cervantes’s play. Right before the first song of the play, Cervantes invites them and, indirectly, the audience to “enter [his] imagination and see [Don Quixote]” (11). The prisoners do enter his story, playing the different characters. As they do, the onstage audience disappears and the remnants of the prison setting are absorbed into the story of Don Quixote. If Wasserman’s directions not to include an intermission are followed, this gradual shift becomes more immersive. In this way, the use of the setting literally reflects the transformative power of Cervantes’s storytelling.
Many of the later interruptions of the play-within-a-play occur only with the Inquisition’s stairway coming down and breaking into the illusion created by Cervantes’s vision of Don Quixote. That lowering stair, introduced at the beginning of the play, becomes the device that connects Don Quixote with the “real” world outside. In this way, Wasserman’s use of the setting supports the idea of The Transformative Power of the Imagination and begins to raise the question of how that connects to the harsh world of reality.
The opening third of the play also offers an initial view of Perceptions of Mental Health that the rest of the play will then complicate. Cervantes states quite clearly that his protagonist, Don Quixote, has left the normal bounds of sanity and his actions are “madness” (25) in the eyes of those who know him. Don Quixote’s disastrous attack on the windmill seems to cement his state of mental health as something ludicrous that should be the object of laughter. Part of the humor in the story stems from this insensitive response to perceived madness.
However, Wasserman also uses humor in this early part of the play to suggest that the perception of Don Quixote as “mad” reflects social expectations subject to critique. Musical Number 5, “I’m Only Thinking of Him,” uses an ironic humor to show that Don Quixote’s own family project a diagnosis of mental illness on him so as to fit him into their own social sphere. The housekeeper sees this as a chance to marry a wealthy man by using his “delusional” need for a lady to capture a man normally outside her social station. Antonia, in contrast, worries that Don Quixote acting outside normal social expectations will drag down her social position, interfering with her own marriage. By referring to Don Quixote’s actions as “madness,” they put his actions outside the social norm. In doing so, they reduce him to his perceived state of mental health rather than considering him as a person first. Man of La Mancha highlights this insensitivity by having them sing that they’re “only thinking of him” when all their concerns show the opposite.
This labeling also becomes a way of managing his non-conforming behavior when Dr. Carrasco is introduced. Dr. Carrasco only can accept Antonia once he becomes convinced that Don Quixote is a health problem to be cured rather than a person to be understood. He curtly dismisses the Padre’s suggestion that Don Quixote has been merely “carried away by his imagination” (29, emphasis added). Rather, he uses his authority as a doctor to insist that they must think of Don Quixote as “suffering from delusions” (29). The possibility of multiple Perceptions of Mental Health—some of which might be more respectful of a person’s dignity—has no place in Dr. Carrasco’s harsh realism of absolutes.
