Don Quixote: a pilgrimage

Written by Jen Schlueter
Directed by Matt Slaybaugh

March 26 – April 12, 2015
@ Columbus PAC
Van Fleet Theater
549 Franklin Ave.
Columbus, Ohio 43215

April 07, 2016 – April 09, 2016
@ Cleveland Public Theatre
James Levin Theatre

Running Time: Ninety minutes.
Talkbacks: After Thursday and Friday performances.
Pay What You Want tickets will be available at the door.

Featuring: Acacia Duncan, Drew Eberly, David J. Glover, Kim Garrison Hopcraft, Elena M. Perantoni, and Alan Woods

Production Manager: Dave Wallingford
Stage Manager: Emily Fisher
Costume Design: Travis Bihn
Lighting Design: Jarod Wilson

Don Quixote: a pilgrimage is supported by grants from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Columbus Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. Additional funding was provided by more than thirty individual supporters through the GCAC’s Power2Give online crowd-funding platform.

ABOUT THIS PLAY

"A funny, fluid and fantastical new work ... Schlueter, director Matt Slaybaugh, and Available Light have created a fiction, a lie, and a wandering wonder."

– Jay Weitz, Columbus Alive
"Whimsical, poignant and lyrical, Don Quixote: a pilgrimage offers images and insights that illuminate life’s erratic journeys."

– Michael Grossberg, Columbus Dispatch

An homage to Don Quixote’s influence, featuring characters from the book mixed with Jen Schlueter’s invented story of a woman, Isabel, making a pilgrimage across modern-day Spain as Sancho Panza and Rocinante (a trusty nag) search for their lost master.

In this splintered adaptation of Cervantes’ novel, Isabel makes a 500 mile pilgrimage across Spain on the Camino de Santiago. Don Quixote: a pilgrimage mixes the massive (and metafictional) novel with a wide variety of modern sources. It examines the power of pilgrimage, how we get lost, and how we can find ourselves again.

Available Light’s latest world premiere production is the result of a year-long collaboration between playwright Jen Schlueter (Joint Artistic Director of the for/word company) and Available Light’s company of artists. Rather than attempting to directly adapt Cervantes’s nine-hundred page masterwork (widely regarded as the first modern novel) the collective used the book as a starting point to explore its structure, characters, themes, and contemporary relevance.

Recommended if You Like: bobrauschenbergamerica, John Cage 101, tilting at windmills