At the very beginning of the new play “Coal Country,” we are told it is “a West Virginia story about 29 men and a big machine.” This is an understated way to inform the audience that what follows will be devastating.
That story is true, and it happened in 2010, when those men all died in a devastating mining disaster. We learn a few things about some of the victims: that Cory was 5 when his dad took him out to shoot his first deer, and that Greg had been Patti’s neighbor for 22 years before he asked her out.
But really, we don’t know all that much about those folks because the show is about the ones who were left behind: It’s Cory’s father, Tommy (Michael Laurence), who recounts that hunt, and it’s Patti (Mary Bacon) who talks about Greg’s courtship. Memories and grief are what they have now.
Anger, too. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s “Coal Country,” with live music by the rootsy singer-songwriter Steve Earle, is also about why what happened at the Upper Big Branch mine can be called a tragedy, but it can’t be called an accident. A terrible twist of fate defines an accident. What happened at U.B.B., as everybody calls it, was precipitated by greed and cost-saving negligence — embodied by Don Blankenship, the chief executive of the company that owned the mine, and whose trial figures in the show. Conditions had gotten so bad that months before the explosion, an experienced miner named Goose (Michael Gaston) had told his wife, Mindi (Amelia Campbell), that U.B.B. was “a ticking time bomb.”
To assemble the script, Blank (who also directed) and Jensen traveled to West Virginia and conducted interviews with people who had lost loved ones that day in 2010. The couple are experienced practitioners of documentary theater, as evidenced in shows such as “The Exonerated” (about former death-row inmates, and in which Earle once appeared) and “Aftermath” (about Iraqi refugees living in Jordan). The testimonies in “Coal Country,” at the Public Theater, have a lean plainness that only makes them more heart-wrenching.
The characters talk about their relationship with the dead, but also their relationship with the mine, which regulates everybody’s life. Driving to his day shift in the dispatch office, Roosevelt (Ezra Knight) would see his dad returning from his night shift underground. Then one day, the younger man did not pass his father’s car coming from the other direction; when he got to the mine, he learned his father had died.
While coal mining has become a hot-button issue, from environmental concerns to political debates, the play offers gentle reminders that options are limited for many folks who were attached to their town and didn’t want to move. “People say why don’t you just quit, I’d rather work at McDonald’s and make $9 an hour,” Mindi says. “But you don’t understand, there weren’t no McDonald’s. Only jobs in this area are coal-related.”
Yet the show is not blind to fault lines within a community that is closing ranks and shunning some of its own if they are deemed not working-class enough. Judy (Deirdre Madigan) may have lost a brother in the mine, but she feels estranged waiting for updates with other members of the community because she is a doctor. “There’s a class division,” she says. “For the first time in my life I was an outsider.”
Earle’s songs (which will appear on his new album, “Ghosts of West Virginia,” due in May) are interspersed through the show at regular intervals. He performs them sitting on a stool, hunched over an old-fashioned microphone; the actors often join in.
The spare numbers do not pretend to offer insights into the characters or move the story along: This is not a musical. Rather, they underline the show’s themes of community and transmission, contributing one more chapter in what feels like an ongoing oral history.
This, after all, is the role music has played in Appalachia for generations. In “Coal Country,” the testimonies and songs cohere into a narrative of timeless exploitation, resistance and tragedy. Tellingly, the first number is about West Virginia’s most famous folk hero: “John Henry was a steel drivin’ man,” Earle sings. “Beat the steam drill down and then he died/And it didn’t change nothin’ but heaven knows he tried.”
He tried, and he died. As for Blankenship, he was sentenced to one year in prison in 2016. Now, he is a presidential candidate for the Constitution Party.
Coal Country
Tickets Through April 5 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
