By Valeria Arreguin
Lookingglass Theater Opens their 2025 Season with David and Kerry Caitilin’s production of Circus Quixote
Theater aims to “seek to understand what it means to be human.” At least it is, according to David Caitlin, director of Circus Quixote. Relayed to him by a theater professor at Northwestern, it encapsulates his experience creating productions for Looking Glass.
Lookingglass is back after a 19-month hiatus and is even more ambitious to release productions. Founded in 1988, the theater took a break in June 2023 due to financial struggles due to the pandemic that resulted in staff cuts. Now, it returns with a new lobby space and reduced production from 3-4 to 2-3 shows per season.
“It is a lot of pressure, and we have an ensemble of 33 artists. … So there are even fewer opportunities for our ensemble members. So, our goal is to get to more productions,” artistic director Kasey Foster says about the reopening.
Marking its 37th anniversary, Circus Quixote, directed by David Caitlin and Kerry Caitlin, is the debut Lookingglass production of the 2025 season as of January 30th. This whimsical play is heavily based on Miguel de Cervantes’ famous Don Quixote. Aligned with the original story, the play explores escapism, friendship, and perseverance during the 2.5-hour run time.
I had the honor of watching it during Valentine’s Day weekend with a friend, and it was worthwhile to experience the ensemble members’ comeback on stage. Despite knowing little of the original Cervantes story or the theater’s performance style before the performance, I still felt the passion that was used to adopt the story through performance and direction. Two particular scenes stood out to me due to the actor’s performance and production elements.
The first scene, a fight between the “Knight in the Mirror” and Don Quixote, occurs in Act 1. The “Knight in the Mirror,” played by Micah Figueroa, is Sanson Carrasco attempting to end Don Quixote’s madness of being a knight. To stop his shenanigans, “The Knight in the Mirror” makes a deal with Don Quixote that will send him back home if he is defeated.
This intense scene was lit with a dance battle, showcasing acrobatic moves such as backbends and less serious moves such as the worm that incited laughter. This seemingly improvised scene was entertaining, with mirroring moves that exaggerated the ridiculousness of the dance battle taking place. It also played with the meta-theme of the book by engaging with the audience’s reactions to the dance battle moves. It successfully showcases the play’s humor and Don Quixote’s determination as a knight.
Another scene that left a lasting memory was the dance between the duke and the duchess in Act 2, Master Nicholas and sister Sofia in disguise. They danced to immerse themselves in their roles in the play. As opposed to the battle scene, this scene lacked dialogue, instead, it was accompanied by background music. Its spotlight on the physical storytelling aspect of the production. The interpretive dancing is indirectly connected to the story but was still entertaining to watch. It serves the purpose of alluring the audience with the members’ dancing skills in the circus ring.
One comment to mention is a person may interpret the moments of circus-esque elements in the play as over-the-top. Overdoing it can overplay the silliness of the play, such as the scene in which Don Quixote and members of the household rock back and forth on the rocking chair. However, I understand it is for dramatic effect, which fits a story like this. So, although it is silly, it adds to the humorous factor of the story.
In a short interview with Director and Co-Writer David Caitlin, I learned of his journey to Lookingglass and his approach to the play’s production.
After a local Pittsburgh theater production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” he observed the intimacy of hanging out and sharing hot dogs and soft drinks behind the apartment complex of one of the cast members’ parents’ house. The sense of community inspired him to be a part of theater. He moved to Chicago shortly after to pursue theater at Northwestern.
Laura Murillo Hart playing the Puppet Master
An Interview with David Caitlin
Q: What was your journey in starting at Lookingglass?
A: While we were performing Alice in Wonderland at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival during the summer of 1987, we decided we wanted to make a kind of theater that was ensemble-based, physical, transformational, and centered on story. We wanted to make theatre that deeply engaged the audience’s imagination and created an immersing experience that pushed the envelope of what theatre can be. So we started Lookingglass in 1988 and ever since then we have sought to bring inventive, moving theatrical experiences to our beloved Chicago and across the country.
Q: Is the circus-esque theme related to the theater as a whole, or just related to some productions?
A: Just certain productions incorporate circus. And there are other directors who will incorporate it. But there is, I think, what is true in most of our stories, there’s often a strong element of collaboration and a sense of ensemble…We try to establish for every show, whether it involves circus or not, whether it involves physical, gestural movement or not, that it is ensemble-based, that there is elements of that…
We also try to-one of the things that is somewhat unique to Lookingglass is that the ensemble votes on the season, that a lot of traditional places, the artistic director will determine the season. And for us, the ensemble has a big part in it, and that part of what happens there is there’s a lot of discussion and dialogue that hopefully is getting to the kind of the artistic core of it…
Our core values are invention, collaboration and transformation and most of our plays have some elements of that. Most of our plays do use design elements for some measure of visual storytelling, and ideally, we’re not trying to make something that just looks pretty, although sometimes there are things that are pretty in a play, but ideally, there’s some kind of deeper visual metaphor or bigger idea embedded in the visual storytelling. Yeah, not just that, it’s cool, but it’s theoretically getting at something that has a slightly, slightly or more profoundly psychological gesture to it.
Q: What made Don Quixote the inspiration [for this play], the message that you’re trying to portray that is timeless and fits in with the physical storytelling aspect?
A: Yeah. So one of the things that that strikes me about this story and this beautiful, hilarious story that Cervantes has written is, on one level, It’s about wanting to be someone else. This is something my wife, Carrie, and I were in charge of-the adaptation together, and we talked about that a lot, that I think for many of us, we all want to be. Sometimes it’s just another version of ourselves, but we want to be able to reinvent ourselves or become the person that we think we can be or want to be, and sometimes that’s different than where we are right now. And I feel like Don Quixote, or, you know, he’s initially Quijano-not Alfonso…Alonso Quijano, as he dreams of becoming something, somebody different. There’s kind of a beauty for that to recreate ourselves, to manifest ourselves in a in a different way. I think that feels, that energy, feels really present, especially coming out of the pandemic.
I feel like another thing that it does is…he goes out and he does something, he tries. He dreams of trying to make the world better, and I feel like coming, you know, when we were all quarantined into our homes and our apartments and our little zoom boxes, we got a little stuck, and it got harder to step out into the world and embrace it and…making something, doing something, trying to make a difference, trying to make the world better. And you know that’s idealistic, but that’s part of what he’s bringing to us, this idealism that even when it fails, even when it’s foolish, there is something noble about that I think is beautiful. And then another thing that feels really important to me about the underlying story is that he goes out and he fails, and he’s beaten, and he’s all but broken and..he barely has the strength to get up. And then he looks up and there’s a neighboring farmer named Sancho Panza who reaches out a hand and lifts him up and helps carry him. And anytime he falls or fails, he’s there…I think that there’s a beauty in that and in the unlikely friendship these two are from…those people with two very, almost opposite point of views, they come together and they make each other better….I think that that that lesson, albeit so simplistic, feels really important in our world right now.
So those are some of the elements, the underlying elements that we wanted to kind of lift up and put into this circus version, also to say it’s, you know, it’s called Circus Quixote. And to me, what quixote does is sort of impossible. He attacks windmills thinking that they’re giants. It’s both impossible, it’s irrational, it’s dreamy. There’s very little common sense, quote, unquote, common sense or rational behavior there. And I feel like to me, a circus. It defies gravity, right? It’s human beings doing extraordinary, unexpected things that don’t really feel rational. It doesn’t feel rational to climb a pole that is spinning in the air and hang upside down and then slide down the pole that doesn’t, and yet there’s something incredibly beautiful about seeing people who are willing to try to do something like that. And I feel like to me, there’s the metaphor of circus. Feels apt when considering the character Don Quixote, who seeks to defy gravity and soar and keeps resisting it and trying to live in this dreamer headspace.
Q: I think it’s very interesting how things can change from going from different, I guess, like, adapting a story into this play setting. So, I was just wondering if you had any creative sacrifices or if it opened up opportunities for anything you kind of elaborated a little bit about the things…such as the elements of the performance.
A: Yeah. So, that idea of it…they exist in two very different mediums, right? The written word and the dramatic action, right? Those are very different. And one of the things that is different is that when you read a book, it’s a very solitary experience and a very powerful experience, very imaginative experience, right? But you get to set it down, and you can, you can put, set it down, and then go get a make yourself a cup of tea…You can pick it up again where you left off. You can go back in some of the chapters, if you didn’t completely understand something.
But with a play, you’re with it from beginning until end, so we need something in the play that, if there’s an intermission, is going to make you want to come back and not go home. So, we need some dramatic tension…For the most part, we need to discern or identify or lift up some kind of dramatic through line that is pulling us through the story and making sure that it is not too heavy handed, but also is clear enough that it does pull us through and keep us wanting more and curious about what’s going to happen next.
You know, in some ways for us, what we were struck by in the novel is that friendship that develops between these two seemingly different characters and how they learn from each other, but also the family, and how one of the things that is lovely over the course of the novel in both its book one and book two is that he-Don Quixote-will change the perspective of his friends and family. They will become different. They will come to appreciate at the very end of book too, when he’s dying, they’re very upset when he wants to return to being Alonzo Quijano…because there’s something that his imagination has brought out in them that has made their lives a little bit richer and more vivid and full. And so part of our challenge is to put that in the dramatic form and ensure that it’s pulling the audience along.
Of when we’re incorporating circus part of the challenge, and this is true, sometimes we’ll whether we’re using circus or elements of dance. We do like to incorporate some measure of abstraction in what we’re doing. We sometimes have moments that are we jokingly call them little dream ballets that are riffing on one of the ideas that’s in the novel and we just need to make sure that the audience doesn’t feel like they’re superfluous or just inserted because we got carried away with something, that it’s actually feeding back into the story…it’s like in a musical, in a way, when characters sing, they’re either advancing the plot or they’re expressing some deeper feeling about what they’re feeling, either for another character or where they are in their lives. And the same is true when we’re inserting elements of physical, purely physical, visual storytelling. We sometimes need to make sure that we’re framing it and helping it along…
It’s a story that has greatly influenced every Hispanic, every Hispanic speaking country, as well as non-Hispanic speaking, Latin [American] countries…And talking about Sancho and Don Quixote as being these characters who are opposite to each other. They’re not the very, very first odd couple pairing of characters there are. There are earlier examples, but this was a really important one that has had huge influence. So, so when we see Dwayne Johnson, the rock and Kevin Hart doing a movie together…Watson and Holmes are very much Sancho and Quixote, any kind of oddball, modern Laurel and Hardy, pairing. Cervantes is probably on somebody’s reading list that is helping them create those characters.
Located at 163 E. Pearson St. at Michigan Ave, Circus Quixote is now playing and running through March 30 at Lookingglass.
