The Mountain King

The Mountain King began as a pair of thought experiments. Westerns hold a special place in American storytelling, yet, we rarely see Westerns on stage. I’ve always surmised that the reason for this is that an integral part of any Western is the landscape, characters moving through it and interacting with it: majestic Cinemascope shots of wagon trains in Monument Valley, awe inspiring horseback pursuits through the Rockies, the agony of human conflict staged against the beauty of the American West. How does one put that on stage? That’s the first experiment. 

 

One answer is to do as Shakespeare does. If Edgar, in King Lear, can tell the audience that a certain scene takes place on the cliffs of Dover, then Joshua, in The Mountain King, can inform the audience that our play begins in the Badlands of Dakota. But that only goes so far. A better approach, I think, is to focus in tight on the characters. Theatre excels at exploring character and narrative at a micro level, more effectively than any other form. Characters have room to breathe and develop. Relationships have time to ebb and flow. I decided on this approach, to take the trope of two characters locked in a room together, forced to deal with their differences, only the room they are locked in is the American frontier. 

 

The other experiment was to adhere to historical accuracy as closely as I could reasonably manage, and to incorporate primary source materials into the script of The Mountain King: excerpts from journals, periodicals, and speeches from the time. While the vast majority of the dialogue in the play is my own, a smattering of original texts survived into the final draft of the play. The excerpts of the dime novel remain almost completely unchanged from the original source, a dime novel about Daniel Boone, entitled The Wood King, and astute listeners may notice that Joshua’s table grace borrows liberally from “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards’ notorious fire-and-brimstone sermon. While the characters are fictitious, the events, language, and beliefs are rooted in history.

 

Ultimately, The Mountain King aims to explore grand themes of 19th century America—Manifest Destiny, the religious foundations of it, bigotry, the American Mythology, and the death of the West—by way of spending forty-eight hours with two unimportant men, with their quirks and foibles, their triumphs and tragedies, and their sad, silly relationship as they wander in the wilderness.