Henry Godinez isn’t the Don Quixote type. That is, he doesn’t much resemble the popular image of that famously misguided knight errant, propagated by everybody from Daumier and Doré to Dali and Picasso. Based, I guess, on a brief description that appears at the beginning of Miguel de Cervantes’s vast 400-year-old comic novel The Adventures of Don Quixote, we’ve come to picture the man from La Mancha as your basic long drink of water. Godinez, by contrast, is compact and muscular. What makes him convincing as the title figure in Mónica Hoth and Claudio Valdés Kuri’s otherwise frustrating Quixote: On the Conquest of Self, running now at Writers Theatre, isn’t his looks so much as his great, good-humored energy. His cracked charm.
The problems arise well into the 90-minute performance, when the script turns from telling this strange Quixote’s story to making him serve an inspirational message. (Spoiler alert: I’m about to discuss a crucial surprise. Stop reading if you don’t want it ruined for you.)
Through 12/17: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847-242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $35-$80.
