| ABOUT THE PLAY |
|
You’d be hard pressed to find a more dangerous way to make a living than skirmishing with a mountain. But to Randy Myler and Dan Wheetman, co-authors of Fire on the Mountain, laborers such as these are life’s heroes. “We forget that,” Myler said in a phone interview from New York City. “We forget why our houses are warm and where our lettuce comes from. We’re all just one generation removed from the soil.”
…Coal-mining may seem an unusual topic for a couple of California natives. But Myler, whose family originally hailed from West Virginia, has coal-mining in his blood. “My dad pulled some strings and enlisted in the Navy during World War II when he was under age just to keep out of coal-mining,” Myler said. “He went to Guadalcanal and came back with malaria. It affected him for the rest of his life, but he still said it was better than working in the mines. Back then, it was the only money around.”
As for Wheetman, “I’m an amateur musicologist,” he said. “My expertise is roots music,” he noted, adding that its origins found cultural expression among immigrants from Ireland and Scotland desperate to escape the potato famine of 1845. They handed America a rich cultural heritage. In Appalachia, isolated by geography from its closest neighbors, the music survived and thrived.
Wheetman and Myler set out to create an oral and musical history of these people. They researched stories and traditional music at The Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and at coal-mining museums. They read diaries and newspaper articles and listened to scratchy recorded interviews. They went to union meetings and talked to miners and their families. “Randy did the lion’s share of the interviewing and I researched the music,” Wheetman said. “We used the actual words of the miners and their families to tell their own stories.”
And what stories. “These people stand in water, use dynamite, they’re lucky if the gases don’t kill them or if they don’t cause a cave-in. The women carry the mines inside them. They pack a lunch in the morning and don’t know if their husbands and sons will be coming back at night,” Myler said, his voice rising in compassion.
“One theme keeps coming back,” Wheetman added. “It’s the same thing people say who have been to war or people whose jobs are in some degree life-threatening. They have an awareness of their own mortality. They have that consciousness that their life is just a moment in time. That does something to people. Over and over we heard things like ‘six friends died in the mines, I have black lung, it’s hell working for this company. But I’d do it again.’ It’s a shared experience, a common bond. They share something that no one else does. That, coupled with that awareness of their own mortality, gives life meaning day by day.”
Wheetman recalls another production of the play in coal-mining territory. “When we did it at the Barter Theatre in Virginia, at some point during the show we’d hear grown men in the audience start to cry. I’d hear them and sometimes I’d get so choked up that I would have trouble getting a song started. Those men were moved that someone was telling their story. I still get chills when I talk about it.”
…Lest anyone think this is a sad or depressing enterprise, both men offer vigorous assurances to the contrary. “First of all, this is not a show solely about the past,” said Myler. “All of this is still going on. It’s about what miners go through. And miners are proud and funny and powerful. Theirs is the most robust music imaginable.”
Wheetman added, “There’s no whitewashing of their circumstances here. We tell the truth. But the sadness is not the compelling part. What’s compelling is what humans do [to survive]. It’s like the Blues. The Blues are meant to purge. It’s not about self-pity.
“Human beings amaze me, the way they face life,” he went on. “Look at the tsunami. It forced us to deal with our humanity. It’s not about our differences. If people are drowning, you jump in to save them! It’s a natural response because life is so precious.”
That is the ongoing story of mankind. We have a human tendency to jump into life’s fires and figure it out later. “When things get bad we don’t just bitch and moan,” Wheetman added. “We celebrate!”
Excerpted from an article written by Teri Downard for The Denver Center for the Performing Arts' APPLAUSE magazine. All rights reserved. |
|
|
|
