Guthrie's 'Shane' offers up a cowboy America that's beautiful

Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can go back to a childhood vision and tie it up with a nice bow.

Playwright Karen Zacarias was 11 when she first read "Shane" and became enraptured by Jack Shaefer's western that was made into an iconic movie in 1953 and, later, a TV series. But what she imagined the characters looked like as she devoured the story of the mysterious lone rider was starkly different from what her teacher did or what Zacarias saw on screen.

"I thought of Shane as Roberto Clemente," Zacarias said of the groundbreaking Latino baseball star. "I'm a Mexican girl who had moved to Boston and this was about a family that had moved north in search of a better life. This was my story, too."

Nearly 40 years later, the Washington, D.C.-based Zacarias got an invitation from Cincinnati Playhouse leader Blake Robison to adapt "Shane" for the stage. She leapt at the chance.

"Blake said you can do it as you first imagined it," the 54-year-old Zacarias said. "So, it's an inclusive, celebratory examination of masculinity."

Also commissioned by the Guthrie Theater, her "Shane" premieres Friday in Minneapolis as a 90-minute one-act starring New York actor William DeMeritt in the title role. Zacarias reimagines the settler family the Starretts as Latinos and Shane as the son of enslaved Cubans.

Theater as a congress

"You can't erase your past or pretend things didn't happen. Shane wants to change but in order to change, you have to acknowledge what has happened," Zacarias said. "It's a western, yes, but it's built like a Greek tragedy and it's about fatherhood and sacrifice."

Trying to escape a turbulent past in which he was always quick on the draw, the title character goes to work as a farmhand for a quiet homesteading family in Wyoming. Soon he is caught up in a conflict between farmers and ranchers. Shane wants to change but the world won't let him.

"Karen has adapted Jack Schaefer's iconic novel with great research, care and creativity," Guthrie artistic director Joseph Haj said. "It exposes as many questions as it provides answers — precisely the kind of tension that makes theater so thrilling."

Film to stage

On film, westerns are often marked by panoramic vistas with cowboys bounding on steeds while shooting at foes. There also are many legendary bar brawls. All of that adrenaline is done to a driving, tension-building score.

"You make it a gripping play so that you're on the edge of your seat," Zacarias said. "You use the tools that you have in theater — fight choreography, music, lighting, design — to make something that's surprising and inspiring."

A western is a departure for Zacarias, who, by her own admission, usually writes female-centric comedies. "Native Gardens," her best-known play and one that centers on neighborly tensions, was a hit at the Guthrie in summer 2017. And her "Destiny of Desire," about newborns mistakenly swapped at birth, was supposed to be staged at the Guthrie in spring 2022 but was canceled because of the pandemic.

If "Native Gardens" was a comedy about how we can be better neighbors, "Shane" is a drama about how we can be better people.

"People talk about toxic masculinity but there's also positive masculinity," Zacarias said. "There are nine different types of men on the stage, and two of them are sensitive, caring and looked up to by this kid as an antidote to all the other men who're ready to shoot everything up."

Director Robison has a creative team that includes fight choreographers Christian Kelly-Sordelet and his father, Rick Sordelet, who are among the foremost practitioners of their craft. Between them, they have 85 credits on Broadway, including "The Lion King," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Titanic." They also work in opera and on films, and the senior Sordelet has taught at the Geffen School of Drama at Yale University for over two decades.

The fulfilling narrative makes him proud to be American, said Rick Sordelet, a Duluth native.

"Sometimes it feels posh to trash America — this is wrong and that is broken — but at the end of the day, this country was built by hardworking people who want to live, to laugh and to raise their children," he said.

Christian Kelly-Sordelet sees the production as additive to the other forms of the "Shane" story that we're used to — the screen versions that take us by the nose into his thoughts and actions, and the book that lets our imaginations spread out with our own visions.

"We have the book, and the movie, now this play," Kelly-Sordelet said. "This broadens the story of America."