The Man of La Jolla’s Impossible Dream : Stage: A contemporary handling of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” is actually a play within a play. Assembling the pieces in this complicated, eclectic vision was no easy task.

Who are the Don Quixotes of today if not the artists?

That’s the question at the heart of “Don Quixote de La Jolla,” a new response to the Miguel de Cervantes classic that opens Sunday.

In the face of rising financial and critical pressure on artistic institutions, what keeps actors sallying forth from stage to stage, tilting at roles as Cervantes’ would-be knight did at windmills?

Don’t they know there will always be someone eager to ridicule their efforts? Don’t they know that most of the time there will be modest, if any, reward for their pains? Can’t they see that, with the National Endowment for the Arts under siege and theaters nationwide buckling for lack of money, they’re pursuing what to anyone with any sense looks like the impossible dream?

No, they can’t see that. No more than Cervantes’ 17th-Century knight could acknowledge that he was an elderly fool and that the age of chivalry, if it ever existed, had long since died.

Sometimes an artist’s belief in the art can be strong enough that he, like Don Quixote, is able to make even the most hardened cynics believe again. And again.

That is the theme behind the La Jolla Playhouse’s “Don Quixote de La Jolla.” It is “Don Quixote” seen through contemporary eyes, a play within a play, with an actor (Geoff Hoyle) playing an idealistic actor playing Don Quixote.

Another actor (Robert Dorfman) plays a pragmatic actor playing Sancho, but only for cash; art for art’s sake is hardly his style. The three-person cast is completed by an actress (Ellen McElduff) playing a befuddled actress hoping against hope to audition as Dulcinea in “Man of La Mancha.”

Toss in a little Beckett, Gershwin and mariachi music, with a nod to the movie “Some Like It Hot,” and you may begin to catch a whiff of this complicated, eclectic vision of a La Jollan Quixote for the ‘90s.

The play, still in the process of being created during a rehearsal five days before its preview, was inspired by Hoyle, whose one-man “The Fool Show” was a hit here two years ago.

Hoyle said he wanted a change: working with other actors as well as a writer and director. He also wanted more of an acting challenge than he had in his previous show. He wanted to explore a story that moved him deeply through contemporary eyes.

“It’s silly to be involved in theater,” he said. “Being an actor is an impossible dream on some level. But life with Don Quixote is not all defeats. There are victories along the way--not in terms of more possessions, but victories of truth, justice, vigor, life, the joy of companionship.

“Better to have tilted and lost,” he smiled, “than never to have tilted at all.”

Des McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, helped Hoyle assemble the pieces that would make the seemingly impossible project only slightly more possible.

Fittingly, the framework of the show seems every bit as wide-eyed and idealistic as the quest of the knight whose very name added the word quixotic to the dictionary.

The playhouse gave six artists, including Hoyle, five scant weeks to come up with a script and a performance-ready show. The artists’ schedules only allowed them that much time for the collaboration, so there was no room for flexibility.

Not only had the six never worked together as a group, but none had ever put together a work this quickly.

Were they daunted by the prospect?

You bet.

The director, Stan Wojewodski Jr.; the writer, Eric Overmyer, and the composer and one-person on-stage band, Gina Leishman, all rejected the project at first.

But, when Wojewodski did join the project, he, with McAnuff’s help, brought along Overmyer. And Overmyer, in turn, brought along Leishman.

During a rehearsal break at the Warren Theatre on the UC San Diego campus, Wojewodski, longtime artistic director of the Baltimore Center Stage, said he turned down the offer at first because “to go without a play and with a deadline is a very frightening idea.”

What made the difference to Wojewodski was McAnuff’s reassurance.

“I finally made a commitment to this attempt because it would put a certain kind of pressure on myself,” Wojewodski said. “I direct progressive, contemporary, non-naturalistic new plays and five-act classics. This strange collaboration--or collision--forces us all to step out of our traditional roles.”

Wojewodski, who had worked with Overmyer on several plays at the Baltimore Center Stage, tried to talk the playwright into coming along, but Overmyer was also resistant at first.

“I saw a tape (of Hoyle’s work), and I said this guy is talented, but I don’t want to get involved with it,” Overmyer recalled by telephone from his hotel, where he was still working on the script.

“I went to see his show in New York, ‘A Feast of Fools’ (the new title for ‘The Fool Show’), and I said, ‘Geoff is talented, but I don’t want to get involved in it.’

“Then Des talked to me about Geoff and what sort of a person he is and how he would be as a collaborator, and then I thought, ‘Maybe I will get involved.’ ”

Leishman, still smarting from the critical reception of the world premiere of the quickly knit-together “Animal Nation” at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, said her first reaction to being offered the project was, “You have to be kidding.”

“After ‘Animal Nation,’ I thought I would never do this again. But that’s why you never say never,” she said, adding that ultimately she just couldn’t say no to the combination of Hoyle and Overmyer.

“I liked the combination of Geoff’s physical stuff and Eric as a great wordsmith,” she said on a break from her keyboard, where she was still tapping out the score.

By contrast, the actors--Hoyle (who first dreamed this impossible dream), Dorfman and McElduff--reported no such compunctions.

Dorfman, a Broadway veteran of “Social Security” and “The Normal Heart,” said he was honored to be asked to join the team. And McElduff, a former member of the Mabou Mimes, said she is used to such collaborative efforts, although she acknowledged that she’s never helped create a work under such intense pressure.

The actors get a “created in collaboration” credit along with Leishman and Wojewodski. Overmyer said he wanted to give them that because so much of the script was inspired by his conversations and observations of the group. He said he tried to mold the parts to the actors’ characters.

Only one actor, Hoyle’s 13-year-old son, Jonah, who appears in a small, surprise part, does not have collaboration credit.

“I’m sort of tailoring it to (the ensemble) and how they respond to the project,” Overmyer said. “It’s a fairly personal play; a lot of the actors’ personalities are in the piece.

“There are some references in the play to the playhouse’s (financial) predicament and how hard it is to keep going. But beyond any particular problems one theater may be having is the problem you always have about how to make a play and how it always falls short of your expectations.

“A lot of it has to do with how the idea of making theater is something like what Don Quixote goes through--the impossibility of making a play and doing that anyway. The day I got here, I was completely terrified and depressed and said to myself that this is just impossible and I should have stuck with my original impulse.

“Then we sat around for a couple of weeks and talked and looked at movies and read the book and looked at ‘Man of La Mancha.’ Then I got very anxious, so I started to write and bring in pages. And I found that the parallels between our idea and the play we were doing were pretty striking.”