Feeling like the city is boxing you in? Longing for a cheese steak? Torn like a tissue between your passion for social justice and your suspicion that socially engaged theater often makes for terrible art? Then follow this three-step plan: (1) Listen to the above song; (2) fall helplessly in love with the sound of the Psalters (think Tom Waits after he has been adopted by a Kurdish tribe that spent time in the Carpathian Mountains while learning the African drums); and then (3) hie thyself down to Philadelphia, where an incredibly high-energy, wildly ambitious new version of the Don Quixote story is taking over the vestry at the Broad Street Ministry.

Full disclosure: Lear deBessonet, the director of Quixote, is a close friend. I got on that Philly-bound Greyhound out of personal loyalty, and while I was taking my seat in the impromptu theater behind the sanctuary, I was already fully versed in the social mission that underpins her theatrical project. Those ingredients rarely make for a critically objective response, so take this with a pinch of salt. But Quixote is a hell heck of a night in the theater. Playwright Lucy Thurber has whittled down the billion-page tome to something approachable and sweet…while not falling into the “Isn’t this just Man of La Mancha?” trap. The cast, a mix of New York pros and homeless shelter regulars, includes David Brooks (often of Theater of the Two-Headed Calf), and his pop-eyed, weary dazzlement might make for my favorite Quixote ever. And though the presence of Broad Street performers is sometimes fantastic and sometimes wildly uncomfortable, I just kept looking up at the Psalters, growling down their anarchist Christian rock from the gallery. Such is the force of their spirit that it even caught me up—doggedly antisentimental, unevenly secular and devotedly judgmental as I am.