South Coast Repertory has declared that this is its 60th anniversary season, making it quite appropriate that a house long known for fostering impactful playwrights start with a work from perhaps its longest-lasting legacy voice.
Dramatist Octavio Solis’s very early play “Man of the Flesh” — a contemporary adaptation of the Don Juan myth — was staged by the Costa Mesa troupe in 1990, more than half the theater’s lifetime ago.
He also authored the second longest running show in the theater’s history, “La Posada Magica.” This annual yuletide Hispanic counterpoint to the perennial “A Christmas Carol” was staged across Decembers from 1994 through 2008.
Solis’ newest work “Quixote Nuevo,” a modern-age retelling of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” — do we detect a repurposing trend across the decades? — now receives a handsome and engrossing presentation on the theater’s mainstage.
While the cast, artistic crew and physical production of this mounting originated at the Denver Center Theatre Company, many of the creative principals are quite familiar to SCR stages, so this is a homecoming of sorts.
The play derives, of course, from the novel “Don Quixote,” published in the early 1600s by the primordial giant of Spanish-language literature, Miguel de Cervantes.
His massive telling of an addled knight errant on a romantic quest and jousting at windmills has continued to strike a chord through the ages and has been staged repeatedly in plays, musicals, operas and ballets.
Here, Solis finds something new, examining it through a contemporary medical plague in aging American life: the national trauma of dementia.
Moved from the plains of Spain to the playwright’s native borderlands of Texas, the central character, a retired literature professor, is being cared for by relatives but is about to be sequestered in a care home.
Juan Quijano breaks free from his waning life in the fictional dusty town of La Plancha. He wanders off on a 24-hour rebellious fantasy trek that is equal parts based in personal reality but is also a delusional rampage. Quijano/Quixote is coming to terms with his own failing present and his regretful memories.
If this sounds a bit grim, no fears: the show, a raucous comedy, is anything but. It’s both literal and magic realism howling at the moon.
Solis’ kitchen sink is vividly and coherently brought to life by director Lisa Portes and an effective nine-member cast mostly taking on dual roles.
The quest includes festive Latin music, Spanish-language slang, social satire, immigration issues, medical science vs. religion debates, lost and lamented romantic yearnings, small and oversize puppets, a helado cart, Pancho Villa’s desiccated finger, a TikTok reference and a shrewd, accurate wisecrack about the current NFL season.
Centering the show is actor Herbert Siguenza’s central role as Quijano/Quixote. This performer has been in SCR’s orbit as part of the comedy troupe Culture Clash, which has periodically and faithfully staged its own social satires in Costa Mesa once a decade since 1998.
At 64, and a veteran of physical sketch comedy, Siguenza is required to stretch emotionally into a fully developed and energetically layered character with a foot in reality and his brains a bit fried.
He proves up to the task. With frowsy hair ringing a bald head — the look channels Doc in “Back to the Future” — and compact, rambunctious energy, Siguenza is entertainingly capable of wrestling two out of three falls with his character’s personal devils.
Every Quixote must have his Sancho Panza and Ernie Gonzalez, Jr., whose program bio notes a professional penchant for playing Shakespearean clowns, has the plaintive persona of the fool — often slyly the wisest man in the room — totally down.
Playing Manny, the local ice cream street vendor, Gonzalez is willing to not just sidekick Quixote on his desert wanderings but support the underlying truths underpinning the fantastical journey.
The rest of the cast is well fitted to their roles. In particular, take note of Raul Cardona, who has a marvelous turn as Papa Calaca, the black leather-clad fantasy figure of muerte, haunting Quixote’s fever dreams and acting as a commenting Chicano specter on the action.
The only objection with the ensemble isn’t an acting problem, but a discordant what-were-they-thinking characterization. Manny’s wife Antonia, an unformed sidelight role, is required to mince about the desert in a short skirt and revealing top like some bimbo Chiquita time traveling from a cheeseball 1950s staging. If there’s a theater doctor in the house, call “out-of-date stereotyping 911,” please!
The much superior eye-candy is the production, something worth beholding.
Efren Delgadillo, Jr.’s scenic design gives us a multi-purpose backdrop for the bleak desert wanderings. Pablo Santiago’s gorged blood red fantasy skies are lighting design at its most evocative.
Helen Q. Huang has done the costuming; she gets the credit for the Dia de Los Muertos outfitting of ghouls that periodically haunt Quixote, as well as the puppets who fill in as the juvenile Quijano and his itinerant farmworker love Dulcinea.
Among its other virtues, “Quixote Nuevo” also includes Solis’ writerly flourishes.
As Papa Calaca advises us all: “Remember in the end, you ain’t what you pretend or what you spend but what you did and didn’t do, said and never said, loved and loved so badly.”
‘Quixote Nuevo’
Rating: 3 stars
Where: Segerstrom Stage, South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa
When: Through Oct. 28. 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m., Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets: $29-$105
Information: 714-708-5555; scr.org
