LA Escena 2023: Hispanic Golden Age Classics

This year’s edition of “LA Escena,” LA’s first festival of Hispanic classical theater –including staged readings, experimental re-imaginings, and adaptations of works from Golden Age playwrights– moves to New York for 2023.

The Hispanic Golden Age offers a vibrant theatrical repertoire. At the same time that England saw the flourishing of Shakespeare on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage and in the decades that followed, Spanish-speaking playwrights including Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Ana Caro, Sor Juana, and Calderón de la Barca flourished on the continent and in the New World. Many of the works created during this time have still not been translated into English.

Tilting at Windmills: Cervantes, Shakespeare, and the Cultural Significance of Don Quixote

• On Tuesday, September 26 at 4:30 pm. Watch the seminar online.
• An interactive discussion hosted by Nathan Winkelstein with scholars Barbara Fuchs and Laura Munoz, Red Bull Theater Founder & Artistic Director Jesse Berger, Rafael Sanchez, and members of UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics

Revelation reading of Don Quixote by Guillén de Castro

• On Monday, October 2 at 7.30 pm. Buy tickets
• Also available on demand between Tuesday, October 3 at 7.30 pm and until Sunday, October 8 at 11.59 pm.
• The reading will be followed by an interactive discussion of the play and its themes with members of the creative teams.

Staged reading of Don Quixote by Guillén de Castro

• On Tuesday, October 10 at 6 pm. Free, RSVP required.
• Directed by Leyma López.

About the play

Guillén de Castro’s play Don Quixote de la Mancha brings together the iconic characters from Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece in an adaptation based on the Cardenio tale that inspired Shakespeare’s lost play.

In a unique twist from the novel, this story focuses on Cardenio and Dorotea and their respective love interests, reimagining this story for the stage with a plot about infants switched at birth, the demands and limitations of nobility, and the obstacles these characters must overcome to find justice and happiness. As the play begins, we are thrust into the midst of high drama as the clandestine love affair of Lucinda, a noblewoman, and Cardenio, a peasant, faces its biggest test when Lucinda confronts Cardenio about his hesitance to propose marriage after six years of courtship. Cardenio, who had never revealed his lower status to Lucinda, increasingly despairs at the impossibility of a happy ending as their love affair quickly becomes tangled with that of the peasant Dorotea and the cowardly Marqués Fernando.

A supreme disappointment to his father, the Marqués moves through the world, taking what he wants and discarding what he doesn’t, and after seducing Dorotea, sets his sights on Lucinda. The titular Don Quixote and his trusty squire, Sancho Panza, find themselves tangled in these stories of love and desire, providing comic relief as they make their way through the plot, forever lost in chivalrous fantasies.