Man of La Mancha

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

D
ALE
W
ASSERMAN
has been in theatre since age nineteen, posting successes as director, producer, and lighting designer before turning to writing. To date he has authored more than sixty works in the fields of television, stage, and movies, garnering more than forty awards. Among his prize-winning TV plays are
The Power and the Glory, Eichmann: Engineer of Death, Stranger
, and
I, Don Quixote
, which was to become
Man of La Mancha
. His movies include
The Vikings, Cleopatra, Mister Buddwing
, and
A Walk with Love and Death
. He is the dramatist of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, making him one of America’s most-produced playwrights worldwide.

J
OE
D
ARION
is the author of the operas
Archy and Mehitabel, Galileo
, and
And David Wept
. In addition to
Man of La Mancha
, he has written the lyrics for the Broadway musicals
Illya Darling
and
Shinbone Alley
. In addition to the Tony, he has received the Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Gabriel Award, the Ohio State Award, and the International Broadcasting Award.

M
ITCH
L
EIGH
studied with Paul Hindemith at the Yale School of Music and has written both jazz and opera.
Man of La Mancha
was his first Broadway musical. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Contemporary Classics Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame for “The Impossible Dream,” and he is the first composer to receive the Yale Arts Award for Outstanding Achievement in Musical Composition.

A NOTE ON
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

Like his contemporary, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra lived a life only sparsely documented, many years of which are veiled in shadow. These things are known: he was born in 1547 to a proud but impoverished hidalgo family; he was a soldier, suffered serious wounds at the battle of Lepanto, was taken captive and spent five years as a slave in Africa. Above all he loved the theatre; in twenty years he wrote some forty plays, none of which were successful. In 1597 he was excommunicated for “offenses against His Majesty’s Most Catholic Church,” narrowly escaping more drastic punishment. He served at least three, and possibly five terms in prison on various charges. Aging, infirm, an utter failure, he undertook the writing of
Don Quixote
to make money. Volume I, published in 1605 when Cervantes was 58, brought him fame but little profit. Volume II, appearing ten years later, insured his immortality as author of the world’s greatest novel, but he was already broken in body if not in spirit. He died in 1616, within ten days of the death of Shakespeare. His burial place is unknown.

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 had
defeated 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 toward
a 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 truth,” says Cervantes-Don Quixote. And that is precisely what I felt and meant.

If there was a guiding precept for the whole endeavor it lay in a quotation I found long ago in Unamuno: “Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.” But on the simplest level, and philosophies aside, the play is my way of paying tribute to the tough and tender spirit of Miguel de Cervantes.

Dale Wasserman

MUSICAL NUMBERS