Preface
MAN OF LA MANCHA was born fortuitously and underwent several metamorphoses before it was exposed to a New York audience. It had its inception in Madrid in 1959 when I read in a newspaper that my purpose in Spain was research for a dramatization of
Don Quixote
. The item was laughing-matter, for like the great majority of people who know
Don Quixote
, I had never read it. Madrid seemed a place appropriate to repair of that omission, however, so I waded in, emerging from Volume Two with the conviction that this monument to human wit and folly could not, and should not, be dramatized.
What
had
snared my interest was not the book but its author. For one learns that the life of Miguel de Cervantes was a catalogue of catastrophe. What sort of man was this—soldier, playwright, actor, tax-collector and frequently jailbird—who could suffer unceasing failure and yet in his declining years produce the staggering testament which is
Don Quixote?
To catch him at the nadir of his career, to persuade him toward self-revelation which might imply something of significance concerning the human spirit—
there
, perhaps, was a play worth writing.
I wrote it first for television in a ninety-minute version. It was produced with considerable éclat and garnered a number of awards but left me profoundly dissatisfied, for the strictures of television and its assertive naturalism haddefeated both my design and intentions. I thereupon rewrote it for the Broadway stage and it was promptly optioned. But I felt a sense of relief when the option period ran out without production, for I knew that while it might conceivably have been successful I still should have deemed it a failure. The play had not yet achieved the form which the material demanded; a form disciplined yet free, simple-seeming yet intricate, and above all bold enough to accomplish that ephemeral objective which is called “total theater.” My brooding on the matter had brought me to the edge of an inescapable conclusion when Albert Marre (whom I had never met) telephoned to say, “Your play is superb, but it
must
become some sort of a musical.”
Precisely.
The adventure began. I use the word advisedly, for the writing of
Man of La Mancha
was an adventure, in form, technique, and in philosophy. My collaborators, Joe Darion, Mitch Leigh, and Albert Marre made enormous contributions as we groped our way toward a kind of theater that was, at least within the boundaries of our experience, without precedent.
It would be heartening to say that the finished play immediately ensnared the interest of producers and backers. It didn’t. They regarded it as too radical, too “special” and, most crushing of all, too intellectual.
Man of La Mancha
floundered rather than marched toward production, sustained only by the tenacity of those among us who shared the Quixotic dream.
But there came a night when lights glowed on Howard Bay’s island-stage, and the audience responded to the performance with fervor that stunned even the most sanguine of us. It was a phenomenon we were to grow familiar with at each performance: a sort of electricity crackling randomly among the audience for a time, then polarizing towarda massive discharge of emotion. Or as Mr. Marre succinctly put it, “They’re not just watching a play, they’re having a religious experience.”
To me the most interesting aspect of the success of
Man of La Mancha
is the fact that it plows squarely upstream against the prevailing current of philosophy in the theater. That current is best identified by its catch-labels—Theater of the Absurd, Black Comedy, the Theater of Cruelty—which is to say the theater of alienation, of moral anarchy and despair. To the practitioners of those philosophies
Man of La Mancha
must seem hopelessly naïve in its espousal of illusion as man’s strongest spiritual need, the most meaningful function of his imagination. But I’ve no unhappiness about that. “Facts are the enemy of
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