Bright Lights, Green City: Taking Off-Broadway Off Coal

Off-Broadway will never be the same after this Friday.

With a revival of Tennessee Williams' first full-length play (about Alabama coal miners) under their belt, an extraordinary Brooklyn-based theatre group--New Mummer Theatre Collective--has just announced their plans to turn New York City's theatre district truly green.

They want to take Off-Broadway, off coal--at least, off mountaintop removal coal.

Last fall, the New York City theatre community launched a remarkable industry-wide initiative, Broadway Goes Green, to "reduce Broadway's carbon footprint, adopt environmentally sustainable practices and promote environmental awareness in the creation and presentation of Broadway shows."

In collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office, "Act I" of the initative called on theatres to "conduct a carbon impact inventory and to set up an action plan to lower their carbon footprint using a wide range of actions, including the conversion of all exterior theatre marquee lights to more efficient bulbs." Within a month, nearly a quarter of the Broadway marquees switched to more efficient lighting. Fourteen other conversions are underway; over 10,000 exterior bulbs have already been changed.

As their own "Act II", the New Mummer Theatre Collective will kick off the New York Loves Mountains Festival on this Friday, May 29th, 8pm, at the Philip Coltoff Center in Greenwich Village, 219 Sullivan Street, with a reading of "Light Comes," the first national-touring original theatre production to explore the dramatic stories behind New York City's birthplace of the coal-fired electrical plant, and its contemporary connection to mountaintop removal strip mining in Appalachia.

Written and directed by Steinberg-Award-winning playwright Sarah Moon, with a cast that includes actress-director Stephanie Pistello, founding artistic director of the cutting-edge environmental production company, Headwater Productions, "Light Comes" is a green epic in scope, and a spellbinding and timely event in contemporary theatre.

Accompanied by acclaimed cellist Ben Sollee, "Light Comes" ranges from the invention of electricity in Thomas Edison's historic lab, to today's ravaged hills and hollows in eastern Kentucky, to the backroom finance deals of King Coal on Wall Street. The play untangles the web of our modern-day coal-fired electrical empire, revealing the truth behind why America runs on coal, and why the fathers of electricity never imagined its reckless duration. In the end, "Light Comes" explores the nightmare connection of mountaintop removal coal that fuels the marquess along Broadway.

The play doesn't end with the last scene. As part of the New York Loves Mountain Festival, a weekend of theatre, music and activism promoting an end to mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia and natural gas drilling in the Catskills, both Moon and Pistello plan to take their "Light Comes" production on the road as part of a national clean energy campaign.

More than 240,000 tons of coal stripmined through mountaintop removal operations are consumed by New Yorkers every year. Thirteen power plants in 11 counties burn mountaintop removal coal. When the marquee signs on Broadway light up, a signal will most likely be sent from the New York Independent System Operator grid to the Lovett coal-fired plant, where the facility service will shovel in coal strip-mined from West Virginia mountains that have been clear cut, detonated with tons of explosives and toppled into the valleys.

For Moon, Pistello and their New Mummer Theatre Collective, the first step toward a Green Broadway is to promote a switch to renewable energy sources in New York. Moon and Pistello answered a few questions on their cutting-edge theatre collective and "Light Comes" play.

Jeff Biggers: Light Comes is the first national-touring original theatre production based on a mountaintop removal family saga and Thomas Edison's first coal-fired plant in New York City. How did you happen to approach and develop a play based on these themes?

Sarah Moon: The first production we did as a company was an early play by Tennessee Williams called Candles to the Sun about a 1930's coalmining family in Southern Appalachia. We took this play down to Louisville, KY and met a lot of great people along the way. One of them remembered us a few months later when musician Randy Wilson was seeking performers to do street theatre for a media action outside the UN and a concert at Riverside Church to raise awareness about mountaintop removal in NYC. We took the opportunity and began researching the subject. We used song, movement and excerpts from interviews with victims of the 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster to create a 10 minute performance piece. That experience, combined with meeting activists like Judy Bonds and listening to an electrifying speech by Bobby Kennedy Jr. convinced us that mountain top removal had to be the subject of our next play.

When I began researching the subject, I realized there was no way I could do it justice simply by presenting the current situation. I needed to go back to the invention of electricity and examine the choices since then that led to an electrical system so successfully privatized that local or national interests, in fact, relentless cries of protest in the governmental halls of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Washington D.C. to stop mountain top removal and preserve our nation's oldest forest, second most biodiverse region and home to Appalachian culture could be utterly ignored in favor of fast, easy money.

Stephanie Pistello: I'm originally from Appalachia, and when I founded the New Mummer Theatre Collective with Sarah in 2006, the point was to create a collaborative theatre company, based in New York City, that would forge a conversation between artists in urban and rural communities. We wanted to talk about things out there in the world that were affecting our lives, for good or for bad. Our first play, Candles to the Sun, was a beautiful first place to start, because it opened up the idea that Appalachia is the home of incredibly strong, resilient people and some of the most beautiful scenery you will every see in your life. It also exposed the incredibly dramatic truth behind the behavior of the coal industry and it's oppression on coal mining communities for the last one hundred years.

At that time, no one was talking about mountaintop removal. In fact, the Sago mining disaster happened just two weeks after our first reading of the play. The familiar face of the underground miner was all over the news. Our cast of 13 traveled through Appalachia in preparation for the Louisville premiere, rehearsing, gathering props and dining with locals along the way. By the time we arrived at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the coalfields of Appalachia held a special place in all of our hearts. The characters we met enriched our performance and stayed with us long after we left. In the spring of 2007, I could still hear the voice of the young woman who, when told we were doing a play about underground miners efforts unionize during the depression, blurted at me "Do you know about mountaintop removal?!" "Yes", I said. "But right now, we have to stay focused on the past..."

So, when Randy Wilson asked if we would perform street theatre about mountaintop removal at a media event at the United Nations, I said, "Of course!" Creating those pieces was liberating, because we were creatively exploring themes that anyone can relate to: family, home, your relationship to nature, the need for clean drinking water, experiencing a bomb going off, and then - electricity. The theme of electricity, to a theatre maker, is an incredible treasure chest of possibilities. The moment Sarah decided she had to include the history behind this invention we are so absolutely addicted to, so much so that we as a society place access to it over access to clean drinking water, we knew we had our story.

JB: How has the play evolved over the past two years?

SM: I think it has gone from being more presentation and broad to being three-dimensional with deeper emotional roots, especially in the story of the family. It has also progressed from being highly didactic with an actual professor character who spoke to the audience about mountain top removal to being more implicit in its message and letting the story carry the play. Our process started in a rehearsal room at Brooklyn Arts Exchange in February of 2008 with a 10-page script and an ensemble of actors. We explored the themes of addiction to electricity and connection to the land being sacrificed for it.

By the end of a month, we had the seed of our play. We presented a first act of the play in July of 2008 in the first New York Loves Mountains Festival. We received great feedback from that performance that led to the cutting of the professor and a re-orientation around the family story. In September of 2008, we presented our first full-length version at Dixon Place, a home for experimental theatre in New York. Based on feedback, we felt like we had the key ingredients of our story and could move on to enrich and clarify the storyline. In February of 2009, we did a workshop read-thru with a group of actors and designers. The discussion that followed inspired further rewrites to heighten the drama in the play. One actor suggested the addition of a parallel character to J.P. Morgan which led to the birth of Major K, owner of the coal company. Along the way, several readers assisted in asking questions and making suggestions. The development of this play has truly been a collaborative endeavor.

SP: The dynamics between characters and the driving actions of the story have evolved in tandum with the local and national movement to end mountaintop removal. We began this journey in 2007 in New York City alongside nearly one hundred coalfield residents and college students who had come to tell the world about mountaintop removal, and we have tried very hard to walk with them ever since. Sarah began her research by interviewing leading activists such as Teri Blanton of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Researcher Tammy Horn, and took a flyover with Southwings. In 2008 I attended End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington, we both led a workshop on Theatre of the Oppressed at Mountain Justice Summer Training in KY, and Sarah attended Mountain Justice Fall Break in West Virginia.

We've not only become activists, we're friends with the coalfield residents and Americans who want to see an end to this egregious human rights injustice, and we've taken the truth of their lives and made it a part of our story. For example, when the Coal River Wind Campaign began, the family in our play also found hope in the possibility of a wind farm on their mountain instead of mountaintop removal, and several lines in the play are inspired from real conversations we've had.

There's also the fact that two years ago, no one would have thought energy would be one of the top three issues for a new Administration. Americans are starting to learn the truth about coal, about where their energy comes from, but we still have a long way to go in understanding the real costs associated with it versus other available, truly clean resources. We've found this awakening helpful in that have been able to take out, for example, the role of a professor who has to tell the audience what mountaintop removal is. Because the grassroots movement has taken good care of that, and the world is listening.

JB: Can you explain Thomas Edison's role in the first coal-fired plant?

SM: Thomas Edison was in charge of building the first "dynamo" or large power plant in America meant to service electricity needs for a large area. J.P. Morgan financed the endeavor and Edison worked like a dog, often sleeping in the partially finished plant even though his family had gotten an apartment in Manhattan for the duration. He was a notoriously hard worker and I believe that was because hard work was his salvation as a child, living in a small-town Midwestern family that had trouble making ends meet. As a kid, he worked as a newspaper salesman on the railroads. I think as some children find emotional succor from mother, Edison found it from hard work. It lifted him up from fear and uncertainty and...it was reliable. I don't think he ever could have let anything "come to him", he went out and got it. He talked about wrestling with Nature to get her to give up one of her secrets. Just from that description, you can see that labor in a physical sense was central to his identity. I imagine that when he thought of himself thinking, he visualized gears actually turning in his brain.

JB: Your play is also centered around a family in the eastern Kentucky coalfields that must defend its family property for mountaintop removal operations. What are some of the dynamics of this conflict?

SP: This play attempts to challenge the idea that the corporations rights to the land, air and water do not trump the people's rights to the same. In Appalachia, King Coal Rules. If you have coal under your property, they have the right to take that land from you whenever they're ready. Sixty years ago, they would dig a mine. Now, they literally blow it up, dig the coal with a giant machine, and dump what's left over the other side into the valley. Many, many people have watched as their family cemeteries, some dating back before the Revolutionary War, were bulldozed up in the name of cheap electricity.

The people of Appalachia are being told that their lives, the lives of their children and their rich cultural heritage are worthless compared to the need for someone in Miami or New York or Sioux City to charge their ipod or microwave their dinner. It's literally a sacrifice zone down there. People are so, so sick from drinking water contaminated with lead, arsenic, selenium, mercury, and chemicals used to wash the coal once extracted. In some areas cancer rates are 70% higher than the national average. Young children are dying of brain cancer, entire neighborhoods of women can no longer get pregnant. But, this is one of the only industries in the region that provides decent paying jobs.

So here you have one half of the people relying on this abomination to feed their families, and the other half dying from it or being terrorized to the point they need drugs to stay calm or sleep or not be depressed. It's a real mess. And when those that are oppressed speak up, their lives are threatened, their dogs are shot, or coal trucks start trying to run them off the road. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to stand up and fight, but that's one thing Appalachians aren't lacking! Just as they did at the turn of the century, they are organizing for a healthy, free, sustainable future in Appalachia. They are using their inventiveness and resilience to look at the mountains and see wind instead of coal, and to convince Washington and Wall Street that it's time for Appalachia to fuel America's NEXT industrial revolution.

JB: Another character takes a job with an investment firm that actually funds mountaintop removal and coal mining operations. Did you want to explore the role of New York's financial community in bankrolling mountaintop removal?

SM: Yes. Without corroboration from financial institutions, mountaintop removal could not exist. When we bank with Citi, we give money to a company that supports mountain top removal. People don't want to have to make these hard choices so they stay ignorant, but the play demands that if they do so, they do it knowingly. I also wanted to draw a parallel with history. The electrical industry is the largest industry in America. How did it become that? Not by accident. Creativity in the financial sector is nothing new. Samuel Insull, who built the electrical empire, but ultimately over-leveraged his holding company, was tried for fraud and decried by Roosevelt as a symbol of all that was wrong in the American financial system. Yet he did such a good job privatizing electricity and fueling it with massive coal fired power plants, that's what we've still got today.

Today, now that we know so much more about the effects of coal extraction and burning, do we really want to continue his legacy or can we change tracks? To change tracks, we will absolutely need the cooperation of the financial industry. They will need to be willing to take risks just like they did in the late 1800's when electricity was first being harnessed. We need investors for the new electrical system. But investors need to think about the welfare of the public and future generations as well as themselves. To these people, the play is saying, "Have honor as well as wealth by doing something that leaves a positive legacy for your children."

JB: What role do you see theatre playing in raising awareness about coal issues, mountaintop removal and climate change?

SP: Theatre can help spread awareness simply by finding stories to tell that exist within these issues. I think part of the reason why it's so hard for people to get engaged in or even notice what's going on out there is because they are so complicated, so tangled, and so outside of our everyday thinking. We are so focused on our own individuality, that unless someone turns to you and says, "Hey, this is ruining my life, man, you gotta help me," we aren't likely to notice. It's important for theatre artists to start looking at the climate issues, including coal and mountaintop removal, and creating work that examines the lives at stake and the future we could be creating for ourselves.

We have this unique ability to communicate and share ideas about the human experience, and these issues are so, so, so full of incredible, fascinating characters and stories. You don't need to be a scientist, you just need to look at what's happening out there in real time. I was involved in the movement to stop mountaintop removal for a full year before actually visiting an active site because I heard the people's story. I saw pictures, but it was the human element that got me. The stories are so outrageous, so rich, and you realize that they are just trying to have a decent life like everyone else in this country. We need bold artists who are willing to go out there, get the stories, and take them around the world. I think there's also a stigma in America about theatre for social change, but hopefully that's shifting as Americans are re-engaging in politics and their communities. As long as we aren't selling propaganda, I think we can be very successful.

Theatre can educate and move people to create change for the common good, not just be another outlet for entertainment.

Comments

[Overtone]

Ending the Need for Coal - Turn Future Cars into Power Plants!

Revolutionary breakthroughs will make possible a Self Powered Internal Combustion Engine - SPICE™.

A SPICE can be used to power a hybrid. It needs no fuel and will end the need to plug-in, as the engine can run when parked and wirelessly transmit and sell power to the local utility.

The SPICE will be powered by hydrinos. Due to hydrinos, one barrel of water can equal several hundred barrels of oil.

To learn more about SPICE and hydrinos see: www.chavaenergy.com

Look under the heading: HOW?

A second breakthrough is the MagGen™. Magnetic generators, without moving parts, will replace batteries in electric cars, trucks and buses.

Many will doubt these technologies are possible - before they are validated by Independent Laboratories. That very important step will be followed by Demonstration Devices.

Until now, car ownership has been an expense. A few plug-in hybrids, equipped with a two-way plug, can feed power to the local utility while parked. The owner of such a car could earn up to $4,000 every year.

Owner’s driving a hybrid with a SPICE, or powered by a MagGen, will earn substantially more.
Vehicles selling power to the grid will turn large parking garages into multi-megawatt power plants.

Many vehicles might be paid for by utilities as they purchase power. The parked cars each become decentralized power plants - a cost-effective alternative to burning coal.

[Thomas Rodd]

Ms. Pistello says: "In Appalachia, King Coal Rules. If you have coal under your property, they have the right to take that land from you whenever they're ready."
In 1988, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth led the campaign to amend the state constitution, and abolish the "broad-form deed" that allowed mineral owners' rights to trump surface owners'. In West Virginia, surface owner rights to block strip mining were achieved in the same period through a series of court decisions. The excellent 2003 book, "To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia," by Chad Montrie, shows how the campaigns of the 60s and 70s were able to wield the rhetoric of surface owner "property rights" against strip miners.
However, it appears that most all of the land now being mined by mountaintop removal is owned by trusts, corporations, limited liability companies, and wealthy individuals. Whoever they are, the "property rights" rhetoric now works for them – somewhat: "It's their land. They want it mined so they can have money. That's their right." etc. The quote in the Biggers article shows that the notion that "If you have coal under your property, they have the right to take that land from you whenever they're ready" still has persuasive power, even if it is not strictly true.

[quidam56]

You have to see it to believe it- http://www.wisecountyissues.com/?p=138 Appalachia can't stand anymore of the progress and prosperity thanks to mountaintop removal.