Shane by Karen Zacarías (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Shane by Karen Zacarías
• Robert Hubbard

SHANE. By Karen Zacarías. Adapted from the novel by Jack Schaefer. Directed by Blake Robison. Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis. July 29, 2023.

Revising beloved classics to adjust for changing cultural mores may inspire antipathy from audience members nostalgically invested in the original. But what if the revisions come from a place of affection rather than derision?

Jack Schaefer published his young adult novel Shane in 1949. By 1953, Hollywood had turned Schaefer’s novel about a wandering gunslinger in search of redemption into a film that defined the US western for generations. While Shane maintains its status as a touchstone of rugged US individualism and white frontier mythology, no serious historian would stand by the historicity of Schaefer’s allegory. Indeed, Schaefer’s popular, pulpy novel with its homogeneous cast of characters and naive attitudes toward western expansion probably reveals more about the 1950s than the 1880s.

As a sixth grader in a Boston public school, Karen Zacarías read Shane and fell in love. The story about an insecure family making their way in an inhospitable new land spoke to young Zacarías’s life experience as an immigrant from Mexico. After becoming an accomplished playwright decades later, Zacarías revisited her childhood crush. The result is an alluring melodramatic hybrid. Zacarías infuses the original story with diversity and accountability while simultaneously enriching the theatricality of the western genre and enhancing the essential themes of Schaefer’s novel.

Zacarías’s adjustments lend the source text both historical authenticity and needed character development. In a note printed in the program, dramaturg Tatiana Godfrey observes that “[b]y the end of the 1800s, about a quarter of all cowboys were Black and an even larger percentage were of Mexican descent.” Fittingly, Zacarías makes the mysterious title character (William DeMeritt) a Black cowboy. Flashes of added exposition reveal Shane to be the son of a plantation owner who raped his enslaved mother. Ambiguous, oblique references that suggest his biological father suffe ed an unexplained and horrible death add depth and intrigue to Shane’s mysterious past.

The Starrett family also receives a racial makeover. In Zacarías’s reimagining, patriarch Joe Starrett (Ricardo Chavira) has a Mexican mother but inherits his Anglo surname from his white father. As an adult, Joe experiences racial discrimination while working in a mine in New Mexico. It is there, we learn, that he falls in love and marries Marian (Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey). Marian had recently become “American” and homeless when her Mexican family’s land was ceded to the United States after the Spanish-American War. Together, the family rode to Wyoming in search of their American dream. Their Latino son, Roberto (Juan Arturo), goes by “Bobby” and serves as the play’s narrator, as he does in Schaefer’s novel. These considerable modifications to the Starretts’ backstory intensify the dramatic conflict by adding a racial dynamic to their looming battle with white cattle baron Luke Fletcher (Bill McCallum), who strives throughout the play to steal the family’s claim.

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Grant Goodman (Stark Wilson) and William DeMeritt (Shane) in Shane. (Photo: Dan Norman.)

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Ricardo Chavira (Joe Starrett), Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey (Marian Starrett), Shayna Jackson (Winona Stephens), Bill McCallum (Luke Fletcher), and Juan Arturo (Roberto “Bobby” Starrett) in Shane. (Photo: Dan Norman.)

The moral purity of settlers “claiming” their stake on the Wyoming frontier also receives scrutiny. To counter the novel’s unexamined glorification of manifest destiny, Zacarías invents the Indigenous character Winona Stephens (Shayna Jackson, Cree/Dakota) out of whole cloth. Winona first appears beside Fletcher in a scene in which she attempts to negotiate a contract for cattle to feed her people. In a revealing monologue, we learn that her tribe was recently relegated to a reservation in the Dakota Territory. Wise to Fletcher’s nefarious double-dealings, Winona privately warns Marian Starrett that “[h]e will steal this land from you just like you stole this land from us,” fully cognizant of the irony. Zacarías’s decision to inject Winona into the climactic...