The explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine—owned by Massey Energy, with chief executive Don Blankenship overseeing it—happened in Raleigh County, West Virginia on April 5, 2010 at 3:27 p.m. Twenty-nine of the 31 miners on duty were killed in an accident that many, including the men working the mine with its problem-causing high-tech machine, saw as inevitable. (Methane build-up minimized by the UBB officials prominently figured in.)
A national uproar ensued, which led to Blankenship’s trial, his conviction for conspiracy to violate mine safety standards, a surprisingly gentle sentence that engendered widespread outrage, his continuing (to this minute) denial of culpability, and even to his unsuccessfully running for the Senate in 2018.
Now and undoubtedly not by chance just about exactly 10 years on from the tragic date, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen—who prompted a significant stir with their stage documentary The Exonerated—have done it again with Coal Country. Working apparently on commission for The Public Theater since 2016, they’ve sewn together a shocking, touching West Virginia quilt of blithe corporate corruption. The result is yet another example of class divisiveness that, were they to see it, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would be coaxing constituents to attend with fists ready to raise in solidarity.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★☆☆ review here.]
What Blank, who also directs with straightforward purpose, and Jensen have done—as is their method (as well as, for instance, Anna Deavere Smith’s)—is interview miners and family members involved one way or another with the disaster. They’ve transcribed the often furious, often tearful testimonies for actors to speak.
They present four miners (played by Thomas Kopache, Michael Laurence, Michael Gaston, Ezra Knight) who either survived or were off-shift but lost relatives. These witnesses also knew too well the disturbing facts of the company’s blind-eyed response to repeated complaints.
Blank and Jensen bring forward three women (Amelia Campbell, Mary Bacon, Deirdre Madigan)—one long married to a survivor, one engaged to a man lost in the mine, one a local doctor mourning her brother. Also appearing, during book-ending court scenes, is US District Judge Irene Berger (Melinda Tanner).
As Blank and Jensen proceed, they pointedly get around to germane mining issues. Perhaps the most pressing—aside from the central story of the explosion—is the union situation. The miners belonged to UMWA (United Mine Workers of America). But when Massey Energy moved in, they pushed for a non-union force to which the miners, needing their jobs, agreed. Furthermore, the men acceded to the compromised treatment they now received. Moreover, they were habitually reluctant to discuss the harsh conditions for fear of being fired instantly.
For Coal Country, Blank and Jensen have included an element that hadn’t occurred to them to add to The Exonerated, or if it did, they nixed the notion. Beloved folk-rocker Steve Earle, occupying an upstage chair with his guitar, begins the documentary-theater piece by singing “John Henry.” Thereafter, he sings his own songs at meaningful intervals, sometime accompanied by cast members. (Towards the end of the 90-minute opus, Bacon gets a poignant solo.)
Lucky for enthusiastic patrons, the seven songs the bearded Earle composed for Blank and Jensen are included on his latest album, Ghosts of West Virginia, due this spring. On it he gives urgent voice to the irresistible “Devil Put the Coal in the Ground” as well as, for obvious reasons, “Union God and Country,” which becomes a production singalong.
The cast members all hit the mark as they hit the marks Blank has plotted for them when they’re moving about designer Richard Hoover’s simple, moodily-lighted (designer David Lander) playing area. Frequently they carry on and off handy benches. Incidentally, at no point do Blank and Jensen post photographs of the actual Raleigh County citizens. Therefore, whether the actors resemble the real interviewees can’t be ascertained. All the same, they damn well convince patrons that these seven must be spitting images of the men and women they’re impersonating—accents, too. (Susan Finch is credited as dialog coach.)
Besides recognizing the UBB 10th anniversary, Coal Country arrives when the coal industry remains an unsolvable domestic problem. For explanations having to do with time moving on and progress(?) being made, coal and the mining of it doesn’t look to have anything like a bright future. (This is counter to the fake, and still unfulfilled, promises the president tosses out at his rallies.)
The Coal Country figures are all honest, hard-working people toiling at jobs that keep them going but not necessarily amassing more than incomes to live modestly by—as opposed to, say, Blankenship, doing quite handsomely by the reported $600,000 worth of high grade coal extracted daily from the Massey Energy mine in question.
In its depiction of a population facing losses of salaries which they’d been raised to believe were their legacies, Coal Country is a companion piece to Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Sweat, which focuses on characters also contending with surviving after jobs have been unceremoniously ripped from them. Blank and Jensen have now offered another important piece to the annals of working-class theater literature.
Coal Country opened March 3, 2020, at the Public Theater and runs through April 5. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
