Madman of La Mancha: A Stage Play of Don Quixote

A stage-play in 16 choice scenes, Madman of La Mancha aims to update Don Quixote for our post-9/11 times. Although often regarded as a “funny book,” Cervantes’s great novel is interlaced throughout with the Christian-Muslim hostilities that characterized his age (1547-1616). My adaptation shows how Cervantes himself—a captive in Muslim Algiers for five years—chose to make an Arabic historian into the “true author” of Don Quixote. A representative of Christian Spain’s most marginalized population, the character of Sidi Hamid Benengeli affords English-speaking audiences a fresh take on the antics of literature’s most endearing madman.