a new play by Sasha Bertoli-Solter, translated by Jeanmarie Simpson

a richly layered audio theatre adaptation based on Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.

Here is a comprehensive dramaturgical analysis of Caleidoscopio by Sasha Bertoli-Solter, translated by Jeanmarie Simpson — a richly layered audio theatre adaptation based on Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.

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🎭 Dramaturgical Analysis of Caleidoscopio

I. Genre and Form

Caleidoscopio is a meta-theatrical audio drama that defies traditional structure. It blends narration, memory play, poetic realism, and auto-fiction into a dramaturgical structure referred to by the playwright as a “Meta-Liminal Frame” — a theatrical architecture in which characters narrate their own actions while also reflecting inward, creating a fractured, layered, and emotionally recursive form.

The form mirrors the conceit of a kaleidoscope: ever-shifting, fragmented, yet cohesive. This choice of structure is both stylistically bold and thematically central, allowing the play to occupy the liminal space between dream and reality, identity and myth, author and character.

II. Adaptational Strategy

Rather than retelling Don Quixote verbatim, Bertoli-Solter inhabits the spirit of the source and infuses it with autobiographical truth. Don Quixote becomes not just a literary figure, but a transcendent metaphor for marginalized identity. The playwright themself — Trans, non-binary, of Afro-Spanish and Puerto Rican heritage — uses the character to interrogate exile, hybridity, and the politics of existence.

This is not adaptation as homage. It is adaptation as insurgency.

III. Character as Mythic Mirror

The three principal figures — Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and the Narrator — function on multiple levels:

• Don Quixote is reimagined as a defiant visionary whose madness is an act of resistance, not delusion. His commitment to idealism in a hostile world mirrors the trans body politic and its refusal to conform to cisnormative scripts.
• Sancho Panza is grounded and earthy, but not comic relief. Instead, he becomes the emotional ballast of the play — a realist who still allows himself to dream, and ultimately carries the legacy forward.
• The Narrator, an overt stand-in for the playwright, bridges the fictional and real, guiding the audience through thematic revelations and moments of emotional rupture. Their monologues recall Spalding Gray, Anna Deavere Smith, or Claudia Rankine in their blend of testimony and poetics.

IV. Themes

1. Identity and Transformation

The play situates identity as mutable, luminous, and politicized. The characters’ journeys reflect a resistance to fixed categories — gender, race, class, and genre are all challenged and destabilized. Quixote’s transformation into a knight mirrors Sasha’s own transformation into selfhood.

2. Madness as Resistance

Madness is not pathologized but exalted as a rational response to an irrational world. Don Quixote is deemed mad not because he dreams, but because he dares to believe in goodness in a cynical age. The same could be said of the playwright.

3. The Power and Danger of Story

Storytelling is both a weapon and a wound. The Narrator uses story to survive, even as they acknowledge its limits: “Stories don’t stop the fire, but they teach us how to carry the ember”. Sancho, too, realizes he has been written into someone else’s dream — a critique of both patriarchy and authorship.

4. Mortality and Legacy

The ending does not offer triumph but a passing of the torch. Don Quixote dies, but his dream — fractured and luminous — is carried forward by Sancho and the children who unknowingly play out his myth.

V. Language and Translation

Simpson’s translation is more than linguistic—it is cultural curation. She integrates the Afro-Caribbean musicality of Puerto Rican Spanish with the formal grandeur of Golden Age Castilian. The result is an English that breathes in two tongues, retaining the spiritual density and emotional rhythm of the original.

Notably, Simpson preserves fluidity around gender and identity, employing ambiguity and open-ended phrasing that respects the nonbinary ethos of the piece.

VI. Sound and Design

The sound design, as described in the script, is deeply metaphorical:

• The kaleidoscope hum and shattering glass recur, symbolizing internal and societal fracture.
• Music uses classical guitar, harp, ambient soundscapes, and vocal harmonies to weave a textural, dreamlike atmosphere.
• Moments such as the lion scene or the final duel at the beach are heightened by silence and restraint — a mark of skilled acoustic dramaturgy.

The stained glass imagery (see page 1) acts as a visual leitmotif for the play’s theme: refracted identity, painful beauty, and the tension between wholeness and fracture.

VII. Staging and Meta-Theatricality

Caleidoscopio exists in a liminal space — never fully within the world of Don Quixote, and never fully in the “real” world of the Narrator. It invites theatrical designers to explore non-representational, symbolic staging: light patterns like stained glass, shifting shadows, silhouettes, and transparency layers — all designed to reflect the instability of identity and memory.

VIII. Critical Reflection

Caleidoscopio is both deeply personal and culturally expansive. It reclaims Don Quixote not just as a Spanish literary artifact, but as a queer, diasporic, Afro-Latinx survival myth. The use of the play as testimony, rebellion, and mourning recalls the traditions of political performance art (e.g., The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks or Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez).

It challenges its audience to interrogate their assumptions about heroism, identity, and the role of theatre itself. It is, in the truest sense, an act of dramaturgical resistance.

🧩 Conclusion: A Kaleidoscope That Burns and Believes

Caleidoscopio is not a faithful retelling of Don Quixote — it is an echo chamber of a soul, where the fragments of identity, story, trauma, and hope refract and spiral. It’s a play that refuses closure — because life, especially marginalized life, refuses it too.

Its dream may be “only a dream,” but it rides forward, regardless.

– 🎭 Carlos Arturo Hernández de Echeverría

Dramaturgo. Sacerdote del texto. Custodio de la palabra encarnada.

Once a seminarian with a secret love for Calderón and Copi, Carlos Arturo abandoned the pulpit for the proscenium. Born in Oaxaca to a lineage of liturgical singers and woodcut saints, he now wanders the Americas in search of stories that bleed truth.

He believes:

• every play is a relic, even the new ones.
• the stage is a kind of altar.
• doubt is the soul of dramaturgy.

He wears his grandfather’s rosary around one wrist, his red editing pen in the other.