Coal Country at the Cherry Lane Theatre is another powerful documentary play by Drama Desk winners Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, the wife and husband creators of The Exonerated in 2000. This time their subject is the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion in West Virginia that killed 29 men, and the search by survivors and family members for justice.
Under Blank’s direction, seven cast members address the audience from a bare, except for four benches, stage to tell the stories without dramatization. The first-person accounts are dramatic enough, as they were in The Exonerated’s stories of people wrongly convicted and imprisoned.
Coal Country features original country/folk music written and performed by three-time Grammy-winner Steve Earle, who is seated with his guitar and banjo to the side of the stage. The show is produced by Audible Theater and is a return engagement of a Public Theater production that was shut down because of the pandemic.
“I had 34 years in coal mining,” says Gary (Thomas Kopache, in photo), the first to tell his story. “My dad was a coal miner; grandpa, dad and me. Back then it was all strictly union, I mean hard-nosed union.”
The miners made little money and were poor but they worked only an eight-hour day and were given lunch breaks in which they could eat sitting and “you didn’t worry about gettin’ fired by speakin’ up.”
It was “union, God and country,” Gary says before Earle teaches the audience the words to the song and encourages members to sing along so people won’t think they’re a scab.
Union, God and country
West Virginia gold and blue
Union, God and country was all we ever knew
But that changed when Massey Energy Company, under CEO Don Blankenship, took over. Not only did the miners lose their little bit of privilege, they lost their safety as well. Blankenship, whose compensation package was tied to production, demanded production reports every half hour of every day, including at his home on weekends.
At Blankenship’s trial it was revealed that the men were sent into the mine with broken and inappropriate equipment and that Massey had been alerted to when inspectors would be appearing, turning the place into what Goose (Carl Palmer) describes as “a ticking time bomb.”
Judy (Deirdre Madigan), a miner’s daughter and the sister of one of the men killed, explained that the company was making $600,000 a day. “And if they shut down for safety, that cuts into that $600,000 a day.”
I won’t quote Judy’s graphic description of her viewing of her brother’s body, or I should say, remains. It’s too horrifying.
Blank and Jensen have once again done a service by giving voice to the suffering of the wronged and ignored in society but I wish I had seen the show before the pandemic so I could appreciate it as much as I did The Exonerated. After two years of death and fear with the pandemic, and the possibility of more to come, of accounts of babies freezing to death in Afghanistan and starving to death in Ethiopia and now the terrifying war in Ukraine, I live each day feeling that I am surrounded by a black cloud. Coal Country is too full of pain. I already felt crushed by the suffering of others. Be warned.
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