The judge at the start of “Coal Country” stands on a box, facing the audience at Boulder’s Dairy Arts Center but addressing those gathered in a courtroom. The cast of the Butterfly Effect Theatre of Colorado’s production of the haunting documentary drama sit on benches, also facing the audience.
They are awaiting their chance to express the anguish they suffered in one of the deadliest mining disasters in the last century. Only, they will not get their day in court. They will not be allowed to make victims’ statements because, according to the letter of the law, they are not victims. This, despite each of them having lost a loved one (in the case of one man, more than one) in a mining explosion in Raleigh County, West Virginia.
On April 5, 2010, the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County experienced a series of explosions starting 1,000 feet down the deep coal mine. Mining giant Massey Energy had disregarded the concerns of its miners while amassing a raft of safety violations concerning the buildup of methane gas and coal dust and inadequate ventilation. Twenty-nine miners were killed; two survived.
Although the mendacity of the company and the tender righteousness of the families would make for a gripping and rending courtroom procedural, “Coal Country” isn’t that.
Instead, once Judge Berger (Simone St. John) tells the victims that they won’t be able to speak at the sentencing of the company chief executive Don Blankenship, the play — by Erik Jensen, Jessica Blank and singer-songwriter Steve Earle — lets them hold forth. What follows is a wrenching but also restorative act of witness and remembrance.
When the Public Theatre in New York premiered the show in 2020 (before the pandemic ended the run), Earle portrayed the musician whose songs bring rootsy force and touching twang to the heartache. For this production, Joe Jung (Earle’s one-time understudy) strums his guitar, setting a mournful tone that honors the pain (but also joys) like a West Virginia troubadour.
The language comes from interviews that Jensen and Blank conducted with the family members. (They edited and molded the many monologues into this fluid work.) The beauty of the characters’ early stories is that they recover what was alive and special about their loved ones; they make who was lost real. They were fathers and sons, brothers and, in the case of Patti Stover (Anastasia Davidson), husbands.
The stories shared just as often attest to a family mining legacy that could go generations deep. There’s pride in that, but it can be a complicated pride. Affable miner Stanley “Goose” Stewart (a terrific Mark Collins) and wife Mindi (Lyndsey Pierce, equally appealing) make clear a fact of a region shaped by mines and wooded hollows: The dangerous jobs have often been the only ones available. If Massey’s seeming rapacity doesn’t put the audience on notice that contained within this play is a labor rights moral, Earle’s song “Union, God and Country” should.
Class is an issue that Judy Jones Peterson, a doctor (portrayed with a formal and thoughtful awareness of that division by Martha Harmon Pardee) touches on. One of her brothers was in the mine, but when she arrives at the waiting room that the company has set up for families, she describes having gotten a chilly welcome. That response may have also been because, as she mentions in passing, a family member was a Massey exec. But it is her account about insisting on seeing her dead brother’s body that seals her kinship with the others.
Director Jessica Robblee has summoned a deep bench of local talent for this production. Last spring, the BETC board handed the reins of the theater company over to Robblee and Mark Ragan, artistic director and producing director respectively. Both are actors, and their regard for the power of performance shines in their and the new season’s first production.
Jason Maxwell vibrates with fury as miner Tommy Davis, whose son, brother and nephew were below him that day. He just barely made it out, living to describe the hurricane-force gales the explosion churned. For four days there was hope that the other Davises had survived by holing up in one of the mine’s underground rescue chambers.
There’s a sweet joy and exhausted sorrow to the account from Roosevelt Lynch Jr. (Cajardo Lindsey) of the workday ritual he and his father had. They’d stop on the same road from the mine — son heading into work, father heading home. He knew something was amiss when he didn’t see his father that terrible Monday.
Massey was slow to release the names of those killed, recovered and identified, so families congregated in a company-provided warehouse away from the media were kept waiting and waiting.
Chris Kendall portrays Gary Quarles, whose description of an exec walking toward him and his wife as they sat in that room is gutting. (Advisory: bring tissues.) They’d been waiting to hear news of their son.
The drama’s action takes place on scenic designer Tina Anderson’s stunning yet spare set. An archway of broad wooden beams, lights strung along its walls and a planked path tapering into the darkness, suggests a mine entrance and its tracks leading down and down and down. The show’s production — lighting by Erin Thibodaux, sound by Jason Ducat, costume by Sarah Zinn — accentuates the no-nonsense beauty of the play and its people.
IF YOU GO
“Coal Country”: Written by Erik Jensen, Jessica Blank and Steve Earle. Directed by Jessica Robblee. Featuring Joe Jung, Simone St. John, Jason Maxwell, Chris Kendall, Mark Collins, Lindsey Pierce, Anastasia Davidson, Cajardo Lindsey and Martha Harmon Peterson. At the Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. Through Nov. 19. For tickets and info: betc.org or thedairy.org
