Playwright Karen Zacarias refreshes the beloved western for a modern audience. Now, the Dallas Theater Center is taking Shane to the big stage.
The 1953 western directed by George Stevens made a cinematic splash when it achieved the near-impossible by capturing the Western landscape in all its grit and glory. Shane, based on the 1949 novel by Jack Schaefer, starred Alan Ladd as a gunslinger with a checkered past who was tasked with protecting a family of Wyoming homesteaders from a greedy cattle baron during the brutal Wyoming Range War of 1889. With playwright Karen Zacarias at the helm, the Tony-award winning Dallas Theater Center has adapted Shane, bringing the story of violence, greed, family, and heart to the stage.
Shane, which opened on January 31 and runs through February 16 at the Dallas Theater Center’s Kalita Humphreys Theater, was written by multi-award-winning playwright Karen Zacarias and premiered in 2023 in Cincinnati. The script, however, was decades in the making. After immigrating from Mexico to the U.S. at the age of 10, Zacarias fell in love with the novel after being assigned to read it in class.
“One of the first books I ever read when I moved to the United States was Shane, and I loved it,” she says. “But the images I had in my head were really different.” As many young readers do, Zacarias projected the world she knew onto the book, creating a mental image in her head very different from the one in the film. “I always imagined Shane was a Black man, and I always assumed the [Starrett] family was a Mexican family like my own. And it turns out my imagination wasn’t historically wrong.”
While the 1953 film sought to fulfill the romanticized Hollywood notion of the West, Zacarias’ play seeks to portray the West as it actually was — full of individuals of all backgrounds fighting against the brutal landscape to make their dreams come true. This Shane, played by New York-based actor Nathan M. Ramsey, is a Black man. Additionally, the Starrett family that enlists Shane’s help is a Latin American family, reflecting the diversity of the Old West.
“What I thought was the wrong view — the idea of a Black cowboy and a Mexican family as part of the Western narrative — actually wasn’t, because one-fourth of cowboys were Black and another fourth were Mexican,” Zacarias says. That historical truth inspired her decision to diversify Shane’s narrative for the stage. “It’s not about changing history. It’s about examining it. It’s about including the people that have been left out. We haven’t changed the story very much. It’s just adding dimension, and not in a revisionist way. Hollywood kept it pretty one color. But the West was full of people from all over the world trying to live and die together.”
In a further effort to create a more factually correct image of the West, Zacarias has also added an Indigenous perspective through the lens of a Lakota character. “The one thing that the book and the movie don’t honor is the fact that, if you’re a homesteader and the government has given you land, that land came from somebody,” she says. “In the play, we recognize that the land was taken from other people, in this case a Lakota tribe.”
In order to accurately portray these characters and the ever-mysterious Wild West, Zacarias leaned on several experts and immersed herself in the Western lifestyle. “I learned a lot. I talked to professors at Northwestern. I had an expert in Lakota language and culture. I went to a rodeo,” she says. “It was really fun. But it was also really scary how little of that history I learned in school.”
But the real challenge still lay ahead: How do you put a western onstage? A genre known primarily for its sweeping landscapes, ruthless gunfights, and horsemen galloping off into the sunset would not translate to the stage easily. “We can’t compete with the movie. So, if we were going to put [Shane] onstage, we had to do it with a lot of care and a lot of respect,” Zacarias says. “We don’t have horses onstage, so we made a theatrical language to create that idea of tension.”
To bring the tension of Shane to life onstage, Zacarias and director Blake Robison turned to Rick Sordelet and his son Christian Kelly-Sordelet, two of the premier fight choreographers in the country. Together, they worked to create a new form of fight choreography that would evoke the energy of a bar fight. “We talked about what happens when you deconstruct the violence and actually look at it from a different point of view,” she says. “So, it’s not about being realistic. It’s about being impactful. It hits you in the gut in a different way because it’s slowed down and you realize the damage these men are doing to each other.”
The action of the classic western is also translated to the stage with the help of sound designer and composer Matthew Nielson, who created original music for the play. “The sound design and music are all written by the same person,” Zacarias says. “We didn’t buy the music. He wrote it for every scene. [The play] has a score, basically.” Nielson’s specialized score works in tandem with Lex Liang’s minimalistic yet impactful scenic design and Pablo Santiago’s lighting design to perfectly invoke the majesty of the Wyoming landscape.
Prior to making its way to Dallas, Zacarias’ Shane played to audiences in Ohio and Minnesota to positive responses. “This play has been in Cincinnati and Minnesota, where there are big Native American populations. And many came to see the play,” she says. “It’s been a really beautiful reckoning in some ways.” The play has also been very impactful to Black and Latin American audiences, who had previously not seen themselves represented in the western. “I was surprised by how many people came back with their sons. And they wanted to get their picture taken with Shane like he was a superhero,” Zacarias says. “That was very moving, especially the little Black boys that came and saw the show and wanted their picture taken with Shane.”
The play must now stand the ultimate test — a Texas audience. “In Texas, there are a lot of different relationships with cowboy culture than there are in different places,” Zacarias says. Luckily, she is not facing the challenge alone. Shane features several local actors who bring their own cowboy spirit to the performance. “The cast is mostly Dallas actors, and watching the love and ease with which they work with each other has been great. It is a play about community, and they really created a community. And because they are all steeped in Western culture, all of the stuff like where the gun goes and how to respect the gun onstage is already in their blood.”
Honoring the western has been key for Zacarias from the beginning of her writing process to the final dress rehearsal. Above all, she aims to highlight the universal themes that Shane grapples with in a way that is accessible for everyone. “People think of westerns as not relevant anymore, but the biggest response we’ve received [from the audience] is how relevant they thought the story was to today,” she says. “A lot of the questions they had in Wyoming in 1889 are some of the same questions we have today.”
To Zacarias, the play is about many things, but most important it is about family and learning to become a better person. “[Shane] is one of the few westerns that’s about a family, and it’s from the point of view of this little boy who is looking at all the adults in his lives making weird decisions that he doesn’t always understand. What I love about the book is that the kid is growing up and learning what it means to be a good man. I think it’s a great question for any age. It’s also about the idea that strength comes in many forms, as well as the idea of protecting who you love but learning to have restraint with your actions.”
Shane is playing at the Dallas Theater Center until February 16. Tickets can be bought at dallastheatercenter.org.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of Karen Almond
