"Don Quixote Rides Again' at People's Light

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard examined the events in Hamlet from the viewpoints of two of the play's minor characters, both of whom are casually killed off. Kira Obolensky's The Return of Don Quixote, the season opener at People's Light, is another contemporary play that mines the plot and characters of a seminal work of modern Western literature.

In Obolensky's conceit, Quixote is real and Cervantes is a writer making a modest living by chronicling his exploits. The Don is in retirement, seemingly cured of his delusion that he's a gallant medieval knight.

But Quixote's life is turned upside down when an unauthorized biography of his exploits with his sidekick Sancho Panza sweeps Spain. Delusional men across the Iberian Peninsula imagine themselves Quixote, donning armor and attacking windmills.

Sancho Panza senses that the book's popularity presents an opportunity to cash in and finally obtain the private island that Quixote once promised him as a reward for his services. He tells Quixote that the book makes a mockery of their previous escapades and of Quixote's love for Dulcinea, the peasant girl Quixote imagined to be a princess. So the two travelers take to the road again, encountering new adventures and ultimately learning what became of Dulcinea.

The Return of Don Quixote isn't bad—just unnecessary. Rosencrantz viewed the mayhem at Elsinore from a startlingly original angle and raised its own philosophical issues, separate from those of Hamlet.

Obolensky's play, on the other hand, largely seems a rehash. She offers a new set of episodic adventures, revisiting the Cervantes themes of illusion, disillusionment and deception. But none of this really adds much to the Cervantes work. Stoppard's play was genuinely memorable in its own right, but The Return of Don Quixote is at best a pleasant minor diversion.

People's Light scenic designer James F. Pyne Jr. does a wonderful job of re-creating the 16th-Century world of Cervantes. He uses a mixture of handsome backdrops, cutout props and lighting effects to cleverly suggest the famous windmill, the rolling Spanish hills and the Don's study, lined with the books that have bent his mind.

Graham Smith and Chris Faith create an appealing chemistry as the Don and Sancho. The performances are appropriately stylized, not over the top: You get the feeling that these two really care about each other.