That some in the audience wore fringe-adorned jackets, cowboy boots and bolo ties to the opening night of “Brokeback Mountain” at Chicago Shakespeare tells you a little about the feelings people have for its two main characters, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist.
The play tells the story of their ill-fated love first sparked during a summer job herding sheep on the titular Wyoming landscape in the early 60s.
Annie Proulx created them in her short story of the same name, first published in The New Yorker in 1997. They were launched into the iconic with director Ang Lee’s emotionally devastating 2005 film version, starring Heath Ledger as the quiet, risk-averse Ennis and Jake Gyllenhaal as the boisterous, rodeo-riding Jack.
This stage version, written by Ashley Robinson and directed by Jonathan Butterell, can’t compete with the epic visual scope of the film, so it doesn’t try. The script is highly faithful, probably overly so, to Proulx’s original story.
There are some nods to finding a theatrical language here:an onstage band performs intermittent original country and western songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, and the lead singer, called the Balladeer (Kat Eggleston), eventually enters a scene late in the show as a character. There’s an opening that subtly frames the piece as a memory play.
Butterell is a choreographer as well as director (he’s best known for his work on the musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” which featured a score by Sells), and Ennis is played by Harrison Ball, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, so there are brief moments of expressive physicality.
The most memorable is during one of the repetitive arguments Ennis and Jack have over their 20-year relationship, where Ennis insists being together for real is impossible, and Jack disagrees. As the fight crescendos, Ball scrunches himself up so tightly it’s like he’s trying to become a rock so he doesn’t have to feel.
Overall, though, this show comes off as highly, even surprisingly, restrained. It returns “Brokeback Mountain” to the gentle, small-scale nature of Proulx’s story, and to its credit, it fully avoids the sentimentality that could easily come from forcing the underlying emotion to the surface.
The result is a show that’s successful to a degree. Poignant but not at all intense, it grasps the extreme contrast between our notions of pure masculinity and stereotypes of gayness (a tension that’s also, by the way, driving the popularity of the hockey-set streaminghit “Heated Rivalry”). But it doesn’t capture the depths of the irresistible connection between the two men, even when they take their shirts, and more, off.
They tell us about it — “This ain’t no little thing,” Jack says of their relationship — and hug and kiss and snuggle, but there just aren’t scenes, or silences, extended enough to fill in the emotion. This is a drama, not a tragedy.
But suggesting that the show feels like it could be so much more also means that the foundation exists and the experience comes off positively, if one sets aside expectations. The story — which remains so potent, so pure, so American, so honest —- is well-told and mostly well-paced. Both Ball as Ennis and Jack Cameron Kay as Jack are likable and compelling; we want very much to care about their desires and terrors.
Cordelia Dewdney plays Ennis’s wife, Alma, with convincing confusion about how to respond to her husband’s betrayal. Tom Pye’s set and costume work manages to evoke the time and place with minimalist elements like a bedspread and a campfire. I’d listen to Sells’ pleasing songs, even though I think they float along the surface here rather than provide insight into the unsaid.
Butterell also directed the show’s premiere in London, with two film stars (Lucas Hedges and Mike Faist) and staged in the round. This is the first North American production, and I get the sense there was some reluctance to change much — to take advantage of a background, for example. The choice may have been to just focus on the actors, which makes this show feel like it would be more aligned with a smaller space.
I can easily imagine this adaptation getting future productions, and would look forward to seeing how other interpreters, including composers, could bring a fuller theatrical imagination to it. Particularly I’d like to see new ways to externalize the characters’ deepest feelings.
After all, that’s why people go so far as to dress up in western wear to come see “Brokeback Mountain.” They feel like they know Ennis and Jack, inside and out.