The Dallas Theater Center has pulled the curtain back on the Wild West in its production of 'Shane', a play based on the novel by the same name.
"In this show, I'm getting to live out a childhood dream I didn't even know I had," lead actor Nathan Ramsey said. "I'm playing the cowboy on stage!"
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WATCH HERERamsey is playing the title role of 'Shane' in playwright Karen Zacarias' reimagined adaptation of the novel by the same name.
'When I got the offer, I wasn't familiar with the story," Ramsey said. "There was a comment, dressing room chatter, where someone was like, 'Well, where does it say in the novel that Shane is Black? And I was like, 'Well, where does it say that he's white?"
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SIGN UP 'Shane' is set in 1890s Wyoming. Like most Westerns, there are highly stylized, choreographed fights and prop gun-slinging, but the diverse casting is meant to be more reflective of the Wild West.
"You know, this is truer to what the Wild West looked like," Ramsey said.
"It's interesting, historically a quarter of cowboys were Black, another quarter were either Indigenous or Mexican," Tiffany Solano, who plays 'Marian Starrett' said. "So we existed in this space and time."
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In the play, the Starrett family highlights Latino culture in the West.
"It's a story about human connection. It's a story about family. It's a story about love; and that's something that all of us experience no matter what race, ethnicity, culture we come from," Solano said. "It's the cultivation of empathy; that's the purpose of theater."
'Shane' runs through Sunday, February 16 at the Dallas Theater Center. For ticket information, click here.
