Nearly thirty years later: a short story by Annie Proulx was adapted into a film that won three Oscars, an opera at the Teatro Real in Madrid, and a play in the West End
At the end of the story, there is a closet, and inside it, two shirts, one tucked inside the other. They are all that remains of twenty years that were never allowed to become a life. Annie Proulx needed only a few pages to arrive at this image. In the three decades that followed, cinema, opera, and theater would each try, using their own tools, to reach that same place.
“Brokeback Mountain” was published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997, and two years later, in a slightly expanded form, it was included in the collection *Close Range: Wyoming Stories*. It won the National Magazine Award and was honored at the O. Henry Awards, but nothing foreshadowed the path it would take: a film that won three Oscars, an opera premiering in Madrid, and a play on the West End. Few contemporary American works have changed mediums so many times, and even fewer have emerged from the process as recognizable as this one.
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The plot can be summarized in a few lines. Summer of 1963: Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two young men from poor families in rural America, are hired to tend a flock of sheep on the isolated Brokeback Mountain. Far from their families, neighbors, and the roles assigned to them, they form a bond that neither of them has the words to name.
When they come down from the mountain, they return to the world from which they had temporarily escaped. They get married, have children, and try to fit into a life that doesn’t fit them. They will continue to meet in secret for nearly twenty years, with Jack insisting that they could live together and Ennis remaining frozen in fear.
THE FOUR MILESTONES 1997 Annie Proulx’s short story is published in *The New Yorker* (October 13). In 1999, it is included in the collection *Close Range: Wyoming Stories*. 2005 Ang Lee’s film starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Golden Lion at Venice, eight Oscar nominations, three awards. 2014 Charles Wuorinen’s opera, with a libretto by Proulx herself. Premiere on January 28 at the Teatro Real in Madrid, directed by Ivo van Hove. 2023 Ashley Robinson’s stage adaptation at @sohoplace in the West End, starring Lucas Hedges and Mike Faist.
Fear as a Legacy
This fear is not abstract. As a child, Ennis was forced by his father to look at the battered body of a man who had been murdered because he was living with another man. Ever since then, he has known that his desire can come at a deadly cost. Social violence has taken root within him before he even had a chance to understand who he is.
This is where the text’s fundamental difference from the long tradition of forbidden-love stories lies. Proulx does not write about two people who are hindered by some external persecutor. She writes about homophobia at the moment it ceases to be a threat and becomes an internal prison. Ennis and Jack do not fail because they do not love each other enough, but because they have learned that their love is not allowed to take on a public form.
The mountain thus becomes the only place where they can exist freely—not because they change there, but because others are absent there. Every descent into the valley is a return to the rules.
Ang Lee and the Economy of Silence
For years, the film adaptation remained a project that struggled to secure funding. The screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana had already been circulating in Hollywood, but the story of two men in the American West who maintain a romantic relationship for decades was considered commercially risky. Ang Lee ultimately took on the direction, and the film was released in theaters in 2005, with Heath Ledger as Ennis, Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack, and Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway as their wives—women who each, in their own way, pay the price for an unspoken truth.
Lee did not treat the material as a bold social drama or as a story that had to explain or justify the relationship between the two men. He filmed it as a great American romantic tragedy. The characters’ gender is a key factor in their oppression, but not in the viewer’s ability to recognize their pain.
The film expanded the world of the short story without sacrificing its simplicity. It made room for weddings, families, and the passage of time. Above all, however, it elevated silence to a central character. Ledger’s Ennis speaks through a body that is perpetually locked away: words come out with difficulty, his voice remains low, his gaze avoids contact. He is a man who has learned to swallow anything that might betray him. Gyllenhaal’s Jack is more open, more impatient, more eager to assert himself. If Jack represents the possibility of change, Ennis embodies the price of fear.
The vast landscapes do not promise freedom; they make loneliness all the more visible. In such a vast world, the two men cannot find even a small place to live together. Gustavo Santaolalla’s music, sparse and melancholic, conveys what remains unsaid: a few guitar notes are enough to convey a life lost before it ever had a chance to exist.
The film won the Golden Lion at Venice and earned eight Oscar nominations, three of which it turned into awards: Best Director for Lee, Best Adapted Screenplay for the McMurtrys and Ossana, and Best Original Score for Santaolalla. Its loss to *Crash* in the Best Picture category remains one of the most controversial decisions in the Academy’s history. Its significance, however, cannot be measured in statuettes: *Brokeback Mountain* brought a queer love story to the center of the global entertainment industry—not as a narrative for a specific audience, but as a love story with universal appeal.
When Silence Found a Voice
The next transformation came in 2014 and, contrary to what is often believed, preceded the stage adaptation by nearly a decade. American composer Charles Wuorinen recognized in the story the elements of a modern tragedy and suggested to Proulx that they adapt it into an opera. The author herself wrote the libretto, returning to her characters seventeen years later.
The world premiere took place on January 28, 2014, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, conducted by Titus Engel and directed by Ivo van Hove, with baritone Daniel Okulitch as Ennis and tenor Tom Randle as Jack. The Belgian director, one of the most important and radical figures on the contemporary European theater scene, served for many years as artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, which in 2018 evolved into what is now Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. In the opera, he avoided any realistic depiction of the American West. He created an abstract and psychological space, where the natural landscape gradually transforms into the characters’ inner landscape.
It is precisely in this paradox that the appeal of this production lies. Wuorinen did not write an easy, romantic score. His music is dark, complex, and often harsh. The orchestra does not sugarcoat the relationship between the two men; it highlights the conflict between desire and prohibition. Their love sounds like something struggling to exist in a world that crushes it. And the mountain, stripped of all geographical context, takes on mythical dimensions: a symbol of freedom beyond time and organized society.
Ninety Minutes in the West End
In 2023, the story was presented for the first time as a stage adaptation. Ashley Robinson’s play was staged at @sohoplace in the West End, directed by Jonathan Butterell, with Lucas Hedges as Ennis and Mike Faist as Jack—both making their London theater debuts. The production was billed as a “play with music” rather than a musical: Dan Gillespie Sells’ original songs, influenced by country and folk traditions, were performed live and served as an emotional extension of the narrative.
The theater could not—and did not attempt to—replicate the vastness of Wyoming. Instead, it returned to the condensed essence of the story: in roughly ninety minutes, the mountain, the distances, and the passage of twenty years were built through the actors’ bodies, the lighting, the sound, and the audience’s imagination.
Crucial to this was the addition of an older Ennis, played by Paul Hickey. The elderly man watched his younger self meet, love, and ultimately lose Jack. The story thus became a memory: a life that plays out endlessly in the mind of someone who now knows what opportunity he let slip away. Without the cinematic backdrops, the audience was confronted with the breaths, the silences, and the awkwardness of two people in a confined space. The simplest and most painful form of the story.
The same ending, over and over
Every art form discovered a different work in *Brokeback Mountain*. In the short story, the economy of language and the harshness of the writing prevail. In film, emotion becomes a glance, a silence, and a landscape. In the opera, what had been suppressed finds a voice and orchestral intensity. In the theater, the story returns to the body, to memory, and to a living presence.
Behind the four versions lies the same truth. Ennis and Jack were not defeated because they were not loved enough; they were defeated because they lived in a society that taught them to fear their own love.
That is why the story still resonates with us, nearly thirty years later. It is not merely the chronicle of two men in the American West. It is a story about the lives we never lived, the words we never dared to say, and the moment we realize that the time we took for granted has already run out.
