The Quest For Don Quixote

The Nutshell

“Playwright Ben Eisenberg sits in a Starbucks, just one day before Don Quixote begins rehearsal. There’s just one problem — he hasn’t written it. His agent is apoplectic, the advance is long since spent, and adapting a 1000-page Renaissance adventure is beginning to feel a bit like, well, tilting at windmills. But then—whether from a stroke of genius or a near-lethal dosage of caffeine and Xanax—Starbucks itself begins to transform, and the errant knight arises in this delightfully theatrical, hilarious retelling of Cervantes’s classic tale.”

The Backstory

 I was commissioned to write an adaptation of the novel massive novel Don Quixote. Let me say here and now, adapting that novel is beyond the bounds of possibility. Not only does the book not lend itself to a coherent adaptation, but one is hampered by the musical Man of La Mancha. Everyone – and I mean everyone – thinks Man of La Mancha is Don Quixote. I found this out the hard way.

So what to do? I was on the verge of a mental breakdown while adapting the novel. So I embraced my emotional collapse and wrote a play about a playwright who is on the verge of a mental breakdown because he’s been commissioned to adapt the novel Don Quixote and he has no idea how he’s going to do it.

Very meta.

Photos from Staged Reading at TheatreSquared

Available for the World Premiere.