The Honor of Madness 

Note from Dramaturg Gabriela Furtado Coutinho



Gabriela Furtado Coutinho

Circus Quixote Dramaturg

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The Honor of Madness 

Note from Dramaturg Gabriela Furtado Coutinho

“Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be.”

El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha has charmed and inspired millions to dream of what “should be” for over four centuries since the first part’s 1605 publication. Author Miguel de Cervantes, from beyond the grave, has connected souls for over four centuries, defying time and space to invite us along for a simple hidalgo’s personal revolution: to live as a knight-errant. We can all find our stories reflected back to us in the whimsy and determination of this bearded, bumbling man who strives to serve others.

El Quijote has suited each historical moment and found new relevance with every read. Without Quijote, there would be no Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, no Doc Brown and Marty McFly friendship duos, and possibly no Freudian psychoanalysis. The novel emerged at the dawn of the modern world, during what some scholars call the ‘big bang’ of globalization. The Old World was beginning to exploit the “New,” and Spain’s nascent Catholic power was just discovering and flexing its muscles. In spite of following the supposed “Dark Ages,” the “Spanish Golden Age” dimmed the light of many constituents.

Cervantes hatched a figure worthy of meeting this chaotic historical moment after a lifetime of disappointments, including three excommunications, four arrests, and five years of enslavement. His heroic antihero would go on to teach readers about willpower, justice, the follies of censorship, and the healing capacities of friendship and acceptance. Yet the world’s first modern novel sustains a legacy as complicated as its protagonist. Its joys are as triumphant as they are poignant, and its ending is as inspiring as it is devastating.

El Quijote is many things. Yes, he slaughters sheep—but he’s only trying to defeat bad guys! Yes, he has been seen as Christlike—and he has also been interpreted as the white savior. Yes, he has maintained status quo in the Eurocentric belief that this is the pinnacle of Hispanic creation—and he has also championed unity and resistance across Latin America. Do we love him, fear him, diagnose him?

Quijote reflects with levity and love a revolutionary diversity of experience, thought, and culture, even more than would have been permissible in Cervantes’s Spain. In imagining into what could be, this work comments on the actual violence of society and teaches us about the possibilities of peaceful coexistence. Look how beautifully Quijote and Sancho’s friendship unfolds, in spite of their differences!

It is this sense of reconciliatory love that harmonizes the characters’ nuances, the array of possible interpretations, and the many cultural backgrounds with which we as audiences approach this story. Our current moment in early 2025 Chicago, too, unites us. Over the past 2 years, studies have emerged linking the arts to medicine, serving as remedy to what the former U.S. surgeon general called “an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” Much has been written recently about the “impossible dream” of running an arts nonprofit. And news each day reveals the trials and tribulations of impossible dreams to Latin American communities.

Quijote doesn’t always succeed—yet he still keeps on. “To dream the impossible dream, that is my quest.” That, too, is the quest of artists.

It is at this moment that Lookingglass re-enters. Quijote’s message of traveling about the world, combatting insularity, offering aid to the suffering, and advocating for justice feels bracing as ever. Lookingglass can tell this story in a way few others can, defying gravity, lifting the most magical and fantastical elements of the text, and thereby replicating the surprise readers must have felt when it was first published.

May your brief time in la Mancha be filled with laughter, wonder, and comfort as we remind ourselves that, if striving to do radical good is madness, then rigorous madness may prove “a healthy reaction to a mad world.” Qué seamos tan valientes.