Closing our 25/26 season is the North American premiere production of Ashley Robinson’s new adaptation of the captivating novella that inspired the Academy Award-winning film. Wyoming 1963: a wild landscape of extreme rural poverty and insular conservative communities. When Ennis and Jack take jobs on the isolated Brokeback Mountain, all their certainties of life change forever as they flounder in unexpected emotional waters of increasing depth. This intense tale of an irresistible and hidden love spans twenty years and is interwoven with soulful, original Country Western songs, performed live onstage.

Playwright Ashley Robinson said, “I’m thrilled that Chicago Shakespeare will host the US Premiere of Brokeback Mountain. Chicago is the perfect city in which to premiere this working-class story of star-crossed lovers. I’m looking forward to bringing the play home, at a time when this beloved story feels more resonant and needed than ever.”

The novel’s author Annie Proulx shared, “Brokeback Mountain has been recreated in several different forms, each with its own distinctive moods and impact. Ashley’s script is fresh and deeply moving, opening sight lines not visible in the original nor successive treatments. The story has always projected a sense of the difficult fated solitudes that echo in Wyoming’s tawny landscapes. The joinery of script, actors, director, theatre, audiences becomes a complex watershed of dozens of mountain streams finally merging into a river of sensibility.”