Just a stage he was going through? Evidently. Off-Loop auteur Blake Montgomery has announced that he’s done with the Building Stage, the near-west-side troupe he founded eight years ago. It’s supposed to shut down at the end of April, after the run of the current show—a delightfully loose yet sharp, deconstructive riff on Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, called Dawn, Quixote. Says here Montgomery intends to “follow new theatrical and educational pursuits.”
As everybody knows, Cervantes’s novel is a two-part, 400-year-old, tragicomic picaresque about a Spanish gentleman of leisure whose life takes a very unusual turn as he closes in on his 50th birthday. Deeply immersed in the literature of chivalry, this gentleman (named Quixada or Quesada or, perhaps, Quexana—Cervantes makes it a point of controversy) takes to reading so much that his brains dry up and he goes crazy. His one and only symptom is a doozy: styling himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, he resolves to roam the countryside as a knight errant and right wrongs in the name of his lady—the chaste, beautiful, and pretty much imaginary Dulcinea.
I suppose Dawn, Quixote may be Montgomery’s The Tempest. Or at least, his version of “Solsbury Hill,” the 1977 song in which Peter Gabriel explains, in metaphor, why he found it necessary to leave Genesis. Montgomery lays it all out with a humor and grace that make you wish the show’s valedictory message were just what I’m hoping it is: an elaborate ruse. Gabriel Franken, Michael Hamilton, Chelsea Keenan, Kate Suffern, Anne Walaszek, and Nathan Wonder perform with casual fluency and precision as the Quixotes; Walaszek’s wildly expressive left eye practically constitutes a seventh cast member. We’ll have to see them elsewhere next time.
Through 4/27: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 4 PM, the Building Stage, 412 N. Carpenter, 312-491-1369, buildingstage.com, $15-$30.
