INTERVIEW: Michael Laurence on the universality of ‘Coal Country’
Photo: Coal Country stars, from left, Michael Laurence and Thomas Kopache. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by BBB with permission.
The new show Coal Country, now playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City, tells the real-life story of miners and their families who were greatly impacted by a horrible tragedy that took place at a local facility in West Virginia. The play, developed by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, features original music by Steve Earle, who sits on the side of the stage and serves as something of a narrator for the dramatic events that unfold.
Coal Country, presented by the Public Theater and Audible Theater, is a piece of documentary theater, an art form that has been given great energy by Blank and Jensen, who previously collaborated on The Exonerated. This means that every single word in the piece was gathered from real mining families in West Virginia, so the script is more like an edited transcript. In the play, Michael Laurence plays the character of Tommy. The actor has been with the show for many years, and he has returned for this off-Broadway engagement.
“The five-show weekends after two years of not being on a stage takes come getting used to,” Laurence said in a recent phone interview. “I had known the co-creators, Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank, for many years as colleagues in the New York theater world, and they asked me to do a workshop of the play. … And Steve was involved. They were workshopping some of the music, and I think, if memory serves me right, this was the last workshop before the play was greenlit at the Public. And then when it rolled around later in 2019, they asked me to be a part of the production at the Public, and I was just thrilled.”
Laurence called Blank and Jensen pioneers in the field of documentary theater, and he has admired their work. The actor believes that although they are turning the microscope on one mining community and one tragedy from several years ago, the themes that surface at the Cherry Lane Theatre are, in fact, universal.
“This piece, while it’s very particular in its story about a particular mining accident that happened about 15 years ago in West Virginia, it sort of has a universal scope to it, to the extent that it’s about a reckoning with grief,” he said. “And so that’s a theme that is as old as theater itself. It sort of goes back to Greek tragedy. There are several moments in the play where they’re talking about how do they care for the bodies in the wake of the explosion — burying of bodies, the preparation of the bodies — it really reminded me of Antigone. These are old ancient universal themes that theater has been addressing since its inception, and I think you really feel that with this piece.”
Laurence’s character of Tommy is a real person, and the lines he says are pulled from interviews that the co-creators conducted. This gives the piece, and Laurence’s role, a certain level of authenticity. Audience members are not sitting in a cozy theater in the West Village; they’re meant to be transported to the homes of these families several states away.
“They started talking to people, and one person would put them in touch with another person and say, ‘Oh, you need to talk to so and so,'” Laurence said about Blank and Jensen’s process. “I think they interviewed maybe 12 or more people, and then through a long process of editing and workshopping the script, they narrowed it down to the seven or eight voices that we encounter in our story. But yeah these are all true stories, and there was nothing added. Documentary theater is all exactly what they said.”
Laurence has not met the real-life Tommy yet. Although the families whose stories are being told were invited for the previous run at the Public in 2020, Tommy couldn’t make the trip. Laurence is hoping there’s still time to meet the man who inspired his performance.
“I was able to see videos of him that are online,” Laurence said. “So you get a real feel for him and his cadences and the way he speaks in those interviews, and of course I had Jessica and Erik and Steve’s stories to rely on. And they had a lot of great stories about Tommy … and all the families that they interviewed. People were so generous with their time and opening up so vulnerably about what happened to them and their families.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Coal Country, featuring Michael Laurence, continues at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
