How Shakespeare Won The West

As happens too often, the glorious efforts of the Huntingon's troupe and designers were wasted on a silly play. Ever hear of dramatic irony, folks? It's what this play needed. Besides the theater was unbearably cold. All that effort: think what a great Twelfth Night they could have done. Not that I want them to stick with old plays - Sonia Flew, Betty's Summer Vacation and others have been triumphant, but this was a stinker.

The five acts of a Shakespeare play go like this: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Resolution, Denouement.

But the play, “How Shakespeare Won the West” went more like this: Exposition, Exposition, Exposition, Exposition, Exposition.

The opening was high school introduction gone awry, with each actor appearing on stage to declare who they were, what they were doing, and to introduce, directly to the audience, other dramatis personae.

So the audience sat waiting for the drama to begin, awaiting the scenes of human interaction that would justify the lengthy introduction of characters. And setting. And time period. And location. And plot. And motivation. And relationship. And action.

Yes, action. Line after line began with the subject, “They,” as in, “They walked until nightfall, and then they built a fire. And they comforted each other.”

And we scrunched up our faces and wondered what was going on, but the explanation of goings-on didn’t end. They lasted through the entire play. It was as though the Huntington Theatre had found a script from a History Channel documentary and decided to put it on as a comedy, simply by reading the paragraphs aloud in the most emotive, over-the-top way. It wasn’t Shakespeare; it was pantomime.

Author Richard Nelson’s source material was from an academic book, called, wait for it, “How Shakespeare Won the West.” Whole segments of the theatrical work seem to have been lifted straight from a book.

If a high school student had written this script, the teacher would have said the old, “Show, don’t tell,” for this play is all telling. Every character is a narrator. When one of the leads finally dies, we need to be told what that means to the rest of the group, because the only way we know what she meant to them before her death was what we’d been told.

Attempting to figure out what I was seeing, and to sustain myself through the second half, I decided that the author’s intent was to present a kind of western campfire story: that genre of exposition and description and play-acting. But campfire stories last a quarter hour, not the 95 minutes that this went on, and an audience at a campfire would give a bigger round of applause than the tepid response at The Huntington following Saturday night’s performance.

The ending’s appearance of an enormous carousel horse and confetti just came off as desperation, a moment of drama in an otherwise expository evening.

If you’d like a night by the campfire, then ask one of the cast members of HSWTW to cut the thing to 20 minutes, and pass the hot dogs. But this story doesn’t belong on stage, so pass on “How Shakespeare Won the West.”

I love the Huntington, but this play was a big disappointment. Cast and production values were excellent, as usual, but the play itself isn't ready for prime-time.