Onstage, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Is Still a Tragedy
In 2016, when the theater director Jonathan Butterell was considering a proposal to adapt Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain” for the stage, he wondered how to translate the prose’s vast landscape and insular emotions into a play.
Last month, in a central London rehearsal studio, Butterell and Ashley Robinson, who wrote the play, tried to answer that question.
To help the cast connect with Proulx’s story of a cowboy and a ranch hand falling in love against the wide-stretching landscapes of 1960s Wyoming, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls during rehearsals. “The vastness has been there from the very beginning,” Butterell said in a recent interview.
When it came to evoking the story’s emotional landscape, the director had stuck one sepia-toned photograph, of a lone cowboy in a snow-covered Wyoming, behind a pillar.
