March 14, 2022
All the way down to the West Village, in fact. Because that’s where you’ll find Coal Country, which is now playing at the Cherry Lane Theater, until April 17th.
And it’s a subway ride well worth taking to see this show. The Audible Theater inside this location seats maybe 150 people max, and with seats ten across, nobody’s much farther than a dozen rows from the stage, which is really nice for a change. There’s also enough legroom to watch the hour and a half long show comfortably, even without an intermission to get up and stretch.
The stage is spare, to say the least. The floor and back wall is a draped plane of log cabin-y looking wood, that, on closer inspection, has some gaps in it here and there. Off to the right hand side there’s a bar stool and a mic on a stand. That’s where multi Grammy Award winner Steve Earle sings and plays guitar (or banjo) throughout the show. Sometimes the cast joins him, and sometimes he sings alone, but in either case, the music is quite enjoyable and serves the show well.
Coal Country’s cast is a seemingly random selection of characters by gender, age and ethnicity, but we soon discover they all lived in the vicinity of the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. And like practically everyone they knew, they either worked in it or had family that did. Additionally, they were each related to someone who died the day that mine exploded in 2010 killing 29 men.
Besides Earle’s fine music and the believable characters this talented cast brings to life, what else made this show special was its origin story, so to speak. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen traveled to coal country and talked with the people we see portrayed onstage. It’s those people’s own words we hear when a character describes the day of the explosion or what life was like before that, and after.
Without spoiling it for everybody, we’ll just say that the performance hit us harder than we expected it to. Much harder. Anyone who was here on 9/11 can identify with the fog of confusion, hope and despair that descends when all Hell breaks loose. Before the show was even halfway through, these characters had ceased being faraway strangers living lives that are frankly unimaginable to Uber sharing urbanites. They were us. We can recognize our loss in theirs, our grief and anger in theirs, our demand for Justice in theirs, and our grim determination to keep going in theirs.
It’s a tragedy made all the worse for aspects this review hasn’t even touched on: the Justice system, profits over people, the loss of union power, economic desertification of areas such as this region of WV. As one character explains, you can’t even decide to not mine coal and just work at a fast food place for minimum wage because there is no fast food place here.
But oddly, doom and gloom wasn’t what we walked out of the theater feeling. We certainly felt the grief and loss of these strangers from the faraway coal mining world of West Virginia. But we also felt a bond with them like we’d never felt before. It’s a start.
