Now Playing: 'Mill Fire'

The disaster at the Sago Mine in West Virginia was almost two and a half years ago, but when actor Heather E. Cunningham, artistic director of Off-Off-Broadway's Retro Productions, came across Sally Nemeth's play Mill Fire, memories of that event -- and the media circus surrounding it -- returned to mind. "I read it in an anthology called Womenswork about two years ago, and I felt it was something I wanted to keep in mind for the future," she says. "We had just done Emily Mann's Still Life, and I wasn't looking to do a play set in the 1970s so soon." But last year, after more coal mine accidents made the news, she began to reconsider. "I thought, Well, maybe this is the right time to do this play. It's a way we can honor the men who have died in the past couple of years, and to remember that we haven't gotten very far when it comes to workplace safety."

The title of the play, originally produced Off-Broadway in 1989 by Women's Project and Productions (now the Women's Project), hints at its theme. In a steel town, a 25-year-old woman named Marlene would appear fairly content with her life. Her beloved husband, Champ, works at the mill, and when they're not working, they're typically hearing about the trials and travails of her older brother, Bo, whose marital problems stem largely from a drinking problem.

But all that pales in comparison to what happens when a terrible accident occurs at the mill. "There's an explosion," Cunningham explains, "and several men lose their lives. It isn't based on an actual event, but Sally Nemeth did live in a steel town and her father was a steelworker, so this is the kind of stuff she knew about. I also read that shortly after she wrote the play and it was done and published, it was performed in a steel mill town at a local university and there was a talkback. Well, in this town there had recently been an accident, so the play resonated with the townsfolk. It was very current then, and I think it's very current now."

Marlene doesn't buckle when the mill owners pressure her, in the aftermath of the accident, to sign on to a cash settlement and go quietly into that good night. To the astonishment and fury of many of her friends and relatives, she chooses to fight the system -- to lobby for fairer working conditions.

"My feeling is that OSHA -- the Occupational Safety and Health Administration -- plays a part in this play because in the 1970s it was very new and no one had a high opinion of it," Cunningham says. "Sally wrote the play already at a distance from that time; now we have 30 years on it. I also hate to say this, because it's such a cliché, but I think we look at things a little bit differently, generally, in our post-Sept. 11 world too."

Another difference between the original production and this revival is the diminutive dimensions of the Spoon Theater. "We're in a very small space, just 36 seats, so it's a really intimate room. There are things that the director, Angela Astle, and I discussed when I was still conducting interviews for the job. For instance, the original production had nudity, and what we're in is really too small a room to ask the audience to watch that. Also, because we're a non-Equity company, I don't feel too comfortable asking actors to take their clothes off. Yet while there are differences in the way we're presenting the play, the play is also very much the same."

For example, she says, "there is a Greek chorus aspect to the play that is challenging in the way it comes across when you read it -- the widows come on and off and they're real people, very real women who have suffered very real losses and who are each different from each other, as opposed to being a single unit like a real Greek chorus. They're coming out not just to tell us what happened at the mill but to tell their stories. They talk about their husbands; they talk about loss and death."

The same loss and death, in other words, that we might learn about on the news or online whenever a disaster like the one at the Sago Mine takes place. "What we know of the steel mill industry in the 1970s," Cunningham says, "sounds like a confluence of events that created a management request for the workers to work harder, for safety precautions to be not as good as they should have been, and it was at the same time that people were being laid off and losing their jobs, so no one wanted to resist." Because those conditions are just as prevalent this decade as they were then, Mill Fire is still a scorching theatrical experience. 

Mill Fire runs through May 24 at the Spoon Theater, 38 W. 38th St., NYC. Tickets: (212) 352-3101 or www.retroproductions.org.

--Leonard Jacobs