Playwright: Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman
At: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie, Skokie
Phone: 847-673-6300; $34-$56
Runs through: June 17
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
The adage about all life returning to dust may account for the almost universal fear of the mysterious world beneath the earth's surface. Our reluctance to venture into the darkness of subterranean realms is nowadays less based in anthropological imprinting, however, than in the long history of injustice associated with the hazardous task of retrieving the precious fossil fuel necessary to our nation's industries.
Fire On The Mountain chronicles this history for us through the music of the people assigned that task—specifically, the citizens dwelling in the impoverished postbellum Appalachian mountain region of the southwestern United States. Newspapers being few and literacy far from universal in that isolated region during the 19th century ( and most of the 20th, for that matter ) , stories were exchanged as ballads, spoken and sung as they have been since the age of Homer and Virgil. Ethnographers researching this oral tradition discoverd accounts of locally significant events hearkening back decades, even centuries, rendered intact with dates, locations and witnesses meticulously documented lest their legacy be forgotten.
Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman have assembled 36 of those into a 90-minute revue, enhanced by authentic photographs enlarged and projected onto huge screens, framed in personal testimonies reflecting three generations of a mining family—from the boy taken out of school at the age of eight to work in the mines for 25 cents a day, to the grandson ordered to shun that deadly occupation at all costs. The roster encompasses the familiar—Dark As A Dungeon, Coal Tattoo, Paradise ( but not Sixteen Tons ) —in addition to an astonishing array of lesser-known compositions, reflecting the ethnic diversity of the population united by hardship and tenacity.
But if Myler and Wheetman paint a romantic picture of suffering and triumph, extra hankies are not needed to ensure a satisfactory audience experience. Laments such as The Blind Fiddler are tempered with wry observations like My Sweetheart's A Mule In The Mines, clog-dancing tunes like Sail Away, Ladies, and rousing union hymns like Which Side Are You On? The nine-member ensemble, led by 'Mississippi' Charles Bevel, playing an assortment of indigenous instruments—guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, dulcimer and mouth-harp—delivers an evening of down-home entertainment to delight pro-labor activists and folk buffs of all ages.