Every once in a while reviewers get a great surprise. A production wanders into town, kinda like an aimless cowpoke, with no advance notice and little previous reputation, and turns into a fine contribution to the community.
The stage galoot this time is an adaptation of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. You might think it’s now on the boards after hanging around since John Ford’s 1962 screen Western that paired John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart for the first time.
In fact, it’s pointedly not an adaptation of the screenplay. Both the movie and this version are based on Dorothy M. Johnson’s 1953 short story. But whereas Ford took many, uh, liberties with the original in order to accommodate his stars and the wide-open Western spaces that movies can so readily explore, this one remains small.
Several good men and bad men on horses may be expected in celluloid circumstances. They aren’t so accommodating within a proscenium or even in more compact venues, which is the case here and which goes some way towards explaining why for this Man Who Shot Liberty Valance version, adapter Jethro Compton has stuck more closely to Johnson’s original tale.
His spin takes place in 1910 at a Twotrees site (in an unspecified state or territory) called the Prairie Belle Saloon and never leaves the confines. Within these walls—nicely designed, bar and all, by Nino Amari—Easterner Ransome Foster (Leighton Samuels) arrives with intentions to educate some of the locals while things are running slow for saloon owner Hallie Jackson (Stephanie Craven).
Not ready for new literacy is the town’s hovering troublemaker, Liberty Valance (Derek Jack Chariton), who takes particular exception to one of the students. It’s Hallie’s best friend and saloon employee, Jim “The Reverend” Mosten (the very effective Daniel Kornegay), a Black man.
The four principals tangle, sometimes while Johnny Cash favorites fill the air. They’re often joined by Hallie’s longtime suitor, Bert Barricune (Samuel Shurtleff), a man with gun prowess more than equal to anyone else riding these ranges.
As Liberty Valance plots it, the entanglements get less and less pretty, culminating in a gun duel between the upright newcomer and the vicious villain. That develops while Hallie, who’s taken a shine to the newcomer, together with the romantically frustrated Barricune, does (or doesn’t?) do something about the likely predictable face-off result.
As the title promises, Liberty Valance is gunned down, about which those who saw the movie know and those who didn’t won’t find out anything more here—no matter how familiar they are with the movie’s title tune, as composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and recorded by Gene Pitney.
What they will be advised is that the Onomatopoeia Theatre Company production—cunningly directed by Thomas R. Gordon and already seen in London and Los Angeles—boasts any number of truly excellent elements.
The acting alone is worth the gallop downtown. As Liberty Valance, Chariton turns menace into a tour de force. In a sequence in which one of his cronies fiddles with a long rope and finally produces a noose, he’s as frightening as just about any malevolent stage critter this observer has witnessed. In the heated and increasingly grave exchange between the courageous but prepared-to-die Ransome and Liberty, they create an atmosphere in which no one in the audience seems to be breathing.
Indeed, all the company’s actors ought to be working regularly from now on. When the normally loquacious Ransome is tongue-tied while confronted with admitting his love for Hallie to her and, in turn, she admitting hers to him, Samuels and Jackson play with complete charm. In the meantime, Shurtleff threatens to trot away with every segment he’s in.
If there’s anything amiss in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it may be that scripter Compton allows the Belle Prairie Saloon characters to be more literate than they would be. Would anyone in this far-flung Twotrees refer to a “scenario”? Would sacrificing Barricune refer to “the autumn of my years”?
Aw, forget it. This nifty stage gift is too good for caviling.
A final thought: Author Johnson probably didn’t have it in mind to present Liberty Valance as a white supremacist, but by the man’s actions with Hallie’s cherished Reverend, he impresses as no less than an especially mean one. For that, this Man Who Shot Liberty Valance takes on pertinent contemporary relevance.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance opened June 10, 2022, at the Gene Frankel Theatre and runs through June 30. Tickets and information: theonomatopoeiatheatrecompany.com
