ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Octavio Solis’s three adaptations of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quijote. Solis adapted Book One of the Quijote as Don Quixote for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2009 and later as a borderlands drama, Quixote Nuevo, in 2018, with further changes by 2021. Don Quixote was an adaptation of the novel to theatre with puppets, using found materials and made objects for the world of fantasy. As Solis developed the play into the borderlands theatre of Quixote Nuevo, puppetry became integrated into the theatre aesthetic, being used for both fantasy and reality, engaging the audience in the imaginative world of Cervantes’s novel. I argue that Solis’s adaptation trajectory shifts from puppet materiality as key to an embodied and folkloric fantastical world through a rasquache aesthetic of found objects to puppetry used for flashbacks and found objects for fantasy. Quixote Nuevo engages the possibilities of object vitality and object agency, extending the use of matter in borderlands theatre to arrive at a place of trauma resolution.
