How the Huntington Lost the Audience

The Huntington’s first production under their new artistic director is a world premiere of How Shakespeare Won the West, by Richard Nelson. A group of actors decide to leave New York for California during the Gold Rush, having heard that the miners are desperate for entertainment and that they love plays, particularly Shakespeare. This sounds like a great premise, and the program contains some fun historical anecdotes about the popularity of Shakespeare in 19th-century America. After finding our seats and looking through the program, we settled in for the ride.

Well, traveling across the country in the 1840’s was wearying, stressful, and generally joyless. Just like the play!

The story, it turns out, is narrated by the entire company. Non-stop. I mean, they really won’t shut up. And the constant bouncing in and out of role does neither the actors nor the audience any favors. It feels like a Christmas pageant in which each child has been given Very Important Lines so that nobody feels left out.

—Look, now they’re telling the story of how they looked for a comic actor for their troupe.
—Oh, now they’re acting out a scene where they find the comic actor.
—Yeah, it’s a shame he’s not funny, but at least he’s not really trying to be funny, is he?

Of course, in a Christmas pageant, the kids are cute, loving family members are in the audience, and there’s an upbeat story. And, with any luck, there’s more than one song.

The fundamental problems with How Shakespeare Won the West lay squarely at the feet of the playwright. He spends far too long setting up the journey across America and not enough time on the journey. You can see the outline he first developed for the story because so much of it remains in outline form and the later pieces are hurried through. (Though I hesitate to suggest that the play should be longer, because I certainly wouldn’t want to see more of it.) The characters are labeled instead of developed, and there’s no relationship between most of the characters because they’re too busy talking to the audience to interact with each other. In fact, the only complex network of interactions happens during the 15 minutes of dumb show as the characters arrive on stage before the curtain.

There’s one powerful set piece where an Indian chief who does not speak English is deeply moved by a performance of King Lear. The distancing of the constant narration is finally overcome for a few moments, though the playwright steps on the emotional climax in a desperate attempt to segue to the next item on his outline.

By the time the characters arrive in California, they are broken, and so is the interest of the audience. The climax of the play felt like an epilogue, and even then the playwright tacked on a secondary ending that just made it all worse. There was no standout performance. I left with admiration for the settlers and prospectors and performers who sought their fortunes or sought new lives in the great American West, sympathy for the actors who worked so hard to accomplish so little, and a deep and abiding hope that I never have to sit through another Richard Nelson play.