The Department of Theatre and Performance Studies will kick off its annual “New Works and Ideas” festival, starting Feb. 22 with “Don Quixote Ugly.”
The play is a new piece of devised theater, titled after a reference to “Coyote Ugly.” The production was put together by various theatre students under the direction of professor Charles Parrott.
The Theatre Development Fund’s Theatre Dictionary says that devised theatre typically begins with little more than a rehearsal space and a group of eager, committed theatre practitioners. Through a series of improvisatory theatre games or other conceptual ice-breakers, they put together a production themselves.
This is exactly the process through which the theatre students have created “Don Quixote Ugly.” The rehearsal process started on Nov. 7, 2016, with various improvisation and movement exercises that Parrott later used to draft a script.
“We have this idea of a playwright as being this sort of solitary figure who’s sitting alone, writing a play in the solitude of their home, and all the characters live in their imagination,” Parrott said. “When you’re devising with an ensemble, you are drawing from the imagination of all the people that are in the ensemble, and you just have more resources that way.”
Parrott has used this process several times before, and, for this particular project, he chose to apply it to the famous novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “Don Quixote.”
“[Don Quixote] has become more famous for its iterations than for the novel,” Parrott said. “It’s almost like we took a handful of elements from the novel and put them into a bag, shook up the bag, poured it out, and started using them to make another show.”
Parrott believes that a theatrical production is an effective place to re-tell this classic tale.
“A lot of the Don Quixote story is about perception and truth,” Parrott said. “Theater as a medium plays with our sense of perception and truth, and it requires us to use our imagination. In the theater — as opposed to film and television — you can sort of have this illusion happen right before your eyes because your imagination is making it so.”
“Don Quixote Ugly” will play Wednesday, Feb. 22, and Thursday, Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. Another part of the “New Works and Ideas” festival, the “8th Annual 10-Minute Playfest,” will show for only one night, Feb. 25 at 8 p.m. Tickets to both shows can be bought for $5 on the theatre department’s website.
