Review: The Ronin Theatre Company Presents Richard Warren's HOW I CAME TO BE BUFFALO BILL

The ariZoni award-winning team of Lee Cooley and Keath Hall (the director and star of Don Bluth Front Row Theatre's 2021 production of ORSON WELLES) returns to the boards in Ronin Theatre Company's staging of Richard Warren's HOW I CAME TO BE BUFFALO BILL: A FIRST-PERSON HISTORY LESSON.

As the title suggests, the legend that was Buffalo Bill has an origin story. It falls to Hall to weave Warren's meticulously researched and well-composed details of Bill's formative years into a compelling feat of storytelling.

The actor's achievement in recounting the stages of Bill's life (Army scout in the Indian Wars, married man, short-lived city developer, and bison killer) and his fascinating encounters with equally legendary ~ albeit blemished by 21st Century standards ~ figures (e.g., General George Armstrong Custer, Wild Bill Hickok) requires the audience's attentive ears. For Hall is a dynamo on stage, delivering his character's reminiscences with non-stop bravado, a swig of alcohol periodically serving as a break in the momentum.

As the stage is set only with the accoutrements that one would associate with Bill's exploits, Hall has a wide berth to regale his audience. As the play opens, Bill is pitchman to the press beyond the stage, selling a journalist not only on his accomplishments but also, and more importantly, on his vision of a new and unique entertainment.

As Bill steps away from the glaring lights of the theatre and enters his backstage quarters, we are in the moment of his life just prior to William Frederick Cody's quantum leap from frontiersman and showman to international celebrity with the launch of the world-renowned (and life-changing) Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

HOW I CAME TO BE BUFFALO BILL was the second installment in The Phoenix Theatre Company's 1999 New Works Festival, which Warren and local actor/director Mark DeMichele founded a year earlier. The play premiered two years later at the Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke, VA.

The show has been promoted as "a first-person history lesson" and a "backstage pass to the origins of Buffalo Bill's reenactment rodeo". In fact, it is far more. More than a window into Bill's definition of himself, the play is an invitation to explore the passage of American culture and history from one stage to another and to distinguish fact from fiction about the realities of the movement westward.

In this regard Buffalo Bill played a pivotal role in how contemporary audiences visualize and understand the "Wild West". As playwright Warren shared with me in an earlier interview, Cody was a transitional figure whose personal evolution parallels that of the American West ` or, at best, how we understand the West. Cody brought the West to the rest of the world in a recreated, fantasized, and stylized recreated way. He romanticized it in a manner that was starkly different from the reality. And, in turn, he was the precursor of the cinematic westerns and such popularized figures as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. (In contrast and reaction to these fictions, society is now engaged in returning to those days of yesteryear, reality-checking the past, and setting the historical record straight.)

HOW I CAME TO BE BUFFALO BILL is a profile of the legend in the making ~ a rendering of the man before he transformed into a self-made creation of show business. Keath Hall brings the character to believable life in a performance that offers a fine lesson in the art of story-telling and is delivered with panache and nuance. Hall can touch the soul, too, when he tempers his character's swagger in delicate moments of grief over the deaths of Cody's mother, his son, and, yes, even his beloved and trusty horse.

The bottom line: HOW I CAME TO BE BUFFALO BILL is A FIRST-PERSON HISTORY LESSON well worth the study...with solid direction and performance to boot.

HOW I CAME TO BE BUFFALO BILL: A FIRST-PERSON HISTORY LESSON opened on August 19th and runs through Sunday, August 28th at at Stage Left Productions in Surprise, AZ. Additional performances of the show will be presented at 7:00 p.m. on September 7th, 8th, and 9th at the Irish Cultural Center in Phoenix ( https://www.azirish.org/performances/).

Ronin Theatre Company ~ https://ronintheatrecompany9.godaddysites.com/

Venue: Stage Left Productions ~ 1340 W. Bell Road, Suite #105, Surprise, AZ ~ Box office: 623-285-6321 or tickets@stageleftaz.com

Poster credit to Ronin Theatre Company

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