This is the first time that I’m writing a Dramaturgy for one of the shows for the DeMatha Players.  With a horribly pretentious name like Dramaturgy, it was a daunting step to take.  For a show like Man of La Mancha, especially with the conscious situation of it at DeMatha’s 75^th anniversary, though, it feels appropriate.

Dramaturgy is, when you pare down the language, the exploration and explanation of why we are doing a show and what that show means to me as a director as well as what themes we think are important in the show.  When I was talking with Dr. McMahon over the last few years about what shows the DeMatha Players were going to do, he was always very specific that he wanted Man of La Mancha to be performed this year, as part of the celebrations of DeMatha’s 75^th anniversary.  I always understood the decision to be primarily rooted in the connection between Miguel de Cervantes, author of the musical’s source material, and the Trinitarians. For five years of his life, Cervantes was imprisoned by pirates and slavers from North Africa, a fact referenced in the show.  The Trinitarians ransomed him as a part of their original ministry, the ransoming of captives.  This affected him deeply, and he is now buried at a Trinitarian convent in Madrid, wearing the habit of a Trinitarian tertiary (a lay member, who is part of the mission and ministry of the Trinitarians but does not live in the community).

I also learned this year, with the death of John Moylan, the former principal here at DeMatha, how the iconic song of this musical, “The Impossible Dream” was a song that was apparently dear to the man who dedicated his life to making DeMatha a school worthy of the song.  I never worked with or for Mr. Moylan, but I can still feel his legacy in all the people who were shaped by him.  I hope that from his eternal reward, he can take some pleasure in knowing that the dream goes on.

As we’ve prepared the show, I decided to change what I put on the program’s title page.  Originally, I was going to put “based on” Cervantes’s Don Quixote, but I don’t think that’s quite right anymore.  Instead, I opted to put “inspired by” Don Quixote.  The plot of the musical pulls from several different sections of Cervantes’s story, involving an inn Quixote mistakes for a castle (a recurring plot device), combining several different women into the play’s person of Aldonza the serving girl, and a couple of different villains into the Knight of Mirrors.  Most important, however, is the deviation from the theme of the play.  Miguel de Cervantes apparently stated that he wrote Don Quixote to spoof the vanity and emptiness of a genre of chivalric romances that was popular in Spain at the time.  These books extolled idealism and virtue, so Cervantes wrote a book in which Quixote’s unhinged adherence to those principles in the face of reality does not end well for him or his companions.  The musical, on the other hand, elevates the pursuit of idealism to a virtue in itself.  There is an element that descends from Greek theater, called the parabasis, when the actor(s) in a show drop the façade and turn and face the audience and declare the moral of the story.  Two such events are in this show: first the Padre sings about how idealism is important; and second Cervantes (who is a character in the play) himself exhorts the audience to believe and not give into the true madness of practicality.  It even explicitly alters the ending of the show relative to the ending of the novel.  As director, I have tried to honor the idealism of the authors of the play as well as Cervantes’s recognition of the madness of Quixote.

Whatever the differences, the show is an astounding piece of art.  I hope that you, our audience, find us capable performers of it.