The Confessions of Davy Crockett:
An Intimate Portrait of an American Hero.
Bart Shatto (Five-time Broadway Veteran and decade long singer for the Gold/Platinum selling Symphonic Rock/Metal band,
Trans - Siberian Orchestra) teams up with Steve Warren (Award-winning - Austin, Texas based writer) to create an immersive and emotional journey of the First American Celebrity Politician and American Superhero, Davy Crockett.
Predating Mark Twain with his homespun honest revelations of politics, war and humankind, this humorous, and visceral storytelling will leave you on the edge of your seat! This is a Davy Crockett that you've never seen before.
This is an experience you will never forget.
Synopsis:
Davy Crockett is one of the most colorful characters in American history.
He is myth, hero and legend all wrapped up into one genuine person.
His accomplishments as a frontiersman, a politician, an Indian fighter and a soldier are well documented. The night before Davy will set off for Texas, his friends gather in a tavern to hear his stories and homespun wisdom one last time. Davy enters the tavern dressed in his trademark buckskin, carrying a bottle of whiskey, and he stands alone on stage to share with us his curious journey through adventures with bears and Indians and war and scandalous politicians and the loss of his beloved wife. Here he tells us of his change of heart in regards to the savage Indians and of his love for the mysterious beauty of the untamed West. He shares his sorrows, his pains, his triumphs, his delights, and his struggle with the bottle following his devastating defeat in his bid for re-election as Tennessee’s representative to the U.S. House, a defeat which drove him from Tennessee to Texas and his final destiny...
And in the humanity of the man, we find his simple heroism.
ACTS: ONE ACT
SET: A tavern in Memphis, Tennessee
TIME: January, 1836
RUNNING TIME: Approximately 75 minutes
ACTORS: One – Davy Crockett, (age 40-60)
CONTACT
Steve Warren
3102 Eaneswood Drive
Austin, TX 78746
512-784-0293
Writer, Steve Warren is a former Navy pilot and high school English teacher. Steve Warren now dedicates his time to writing for stage and screen. His Civil War play REBEL YELLS, winner of Northern Kentucky University’s YES Festival, has been produced in nine theatres across the country and was nominated for 11 Austin Circle of Theatre Awards. GONE TO TEXAS, the musical for which he wrote the book, has been produced multiple times in several Texas theatres and was given a reading at New York’s York Theatre. His short play THE CHECKER GAME was one of thirty plays out of 1500 selected by Samuel French for production in their Off-Off-Broadway Festival in 2015. Steve belongs to Austin ScriptWorks, a group of playwrights helping playwrights. He is also an award-winning screenwriter represented by Laura Barrett Management of Los Angeles. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Debbi.
Bart Shatto is no stranger to playing historical and literary characters, having played literary figure Jean Valjean (from Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables") on Broadway and National Tour, Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde (from Robert Louis Stevenson's "Jekyll and Hyde"), Long John Silver (from Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island"), Quincey Morris (from Bram Soker's "Dracula") to real life characters D.H. Lawrence ("Lawrence: the musical) to Tony-nominated "Civil War" on Broadway ( Union soldier, Elmore Hotchkiss) to Tony-nominated Broadway's "Hands on a Hardbody" (J.D. Drew and Benny Perkins).
Sources
NEW YORK TIMES
November 23, 1998
The Many Davy Crocketts
By MICHAEL LIND
WASHINGTON -- Davy Crockett is in the news again, thanks to last week's sale of a diary by a Mexican army officer that includes a description of Crockett's execution after the battle of the Alamo in 1836.
The memoir's authenticity is now widely accepted, but questions remain
because it includes a dubious account of the death of the Alamo's commander, William Barret Travis.
Accurate or not, the diary of the officer, Jose Enrique de la Pena,
claims that Crockett met his death bravely: "Though tortured before they were killed, these unfortunates died without complaining and without humiliating themselves before their torturers." The only dispute, then, is about what kind of heroic death Crockett suffered.
Nevertheless, since it was first translated into English in the 1970's,
the de la Pena diary has been used by Crockett debunkers to bolster their argument that Davy Crockett was not a hero at all.
This argument was revived in the 1990's by Garry Wills.
Earlier, in the 1950's, the columnist Murray Kempton wrote four essays
in The New York Post vilifying the Tennessee frontiersman as "a fellow purchasable for no more than a drink." His columns caused an uproar. Children picketed The Post carrying signs that read: "Who you gonna expose next? Santa Claus?"
Curiously, most of the debunkers have been on the political left.
For the more genteel liberals, the enormously popular "Davy Crockett"
Disney television series of the 1950's was an embarrassment, a cornpone reflection of American provincialism and backwardness. They were further inflamed by "The Alamo," the 1960 movie starring the right-wing actor John Wayne as Crockett.
An even more important reason for the left's hostility to the Crockett
legend was the midcentury divorce between liberalism and populism. Since Crockett folklore combines the myth of the Old West with the myth of the common man, it has come to symbolize American populism.
At the turn of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt, who founded the
Boone and Crockett club, saw no contradiction between his admiration for Crockett and his own Progressivism and conservationist views. During the New Deal, muralists depicted pioneers like Crockett as symbols of the ordinary American. However, post-1945 American liberalism was shaped by the Old Left and a genteel liberalism that owes more to high-toned Yankee progressivism than to the New Deal.
The Old Left despised Crockett because he was the wrong kind of common man -- a frontier individualist, rather than a solidarity-minded factory worker. Although labor leaders like Brendon Sexton of the United Auto Workers criticized the Crockett fad, working-class whites, in the North and East, provided an approving audience for the Disney series, which starred Fess Parker, just as they did for "Crockett almanacs" of the 1840's. To this day, there is a small but vigorous Crockett cult, even in places like Long Island and New Jersey. Members of the white ethnic coonskin-cap brigade may not be well versed in formal history, but they know that the people who look down on Davy Crockett look down on them, too. In the 1950's, conservatives moved quickly to claim the patriotic populism repudiated by snobbish liberals. As William F. Buckley Jr. declared in 1955, "The assault on Davy is one part traditional debunking campaign and one part resentment by liberal publicists of Davy's neurosis-free approach to life."
It is by no means clear, however, that Crockett would approve of today's conservatism. In his own day, the Tennessee Congressman criticized West Point for being elitist and deplored the Indian removal policy of his archenemy, President Andrew Jackson, the forerunner of today's Southern conservatives. Indeed, Crockett was considered as a Presidential candidate by the Whigs, the precursors of today's predominantly Northern liberals. And he died, after all, in the Texan rebellion against the Mexican equivalent of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
The two unidentified Texans who paid $350,000 for de la Pena's diary
last week may be able to solve some minor historical mysteries about the actual David Crockett by submitting it to scientific tests. The larger Crockett myth, however, has long since passed the test of history.
The only mystery that remains is why the symbol of Davy Crockett should
be the property of one political faction rather than of all Americans.
Michael Lind, the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine,
is the author of "The Alamo: An Epic."
