A playwright’s perspective on the process of a ‘project’

by Alan M. Gratz

The story of the Coal Creek Project begins and ends with a song.

It was a long time ago—we’re talking years here—that Amy Hubbard of the Actors Co-op first approached me with the idea of writing a play about a mine disaster. The Co-op had already produced two of my plays. The most recent, a tale of young Andrew Jackson’s days in East Tennessee, proved that regional history could make for entertaining and popular theater, and perhaps put Amy in a mind to look for more such stories to mine. (If you’ll forgive the pun.)

Amy had been listening to Wakefield Widow, a beautiful song by local musicians Sarah Pirkle and Jeff Barbra that tells the story of an entire town left widowed and orphaned by a mine disaster. It was all she had, but the idea intrigued her. “I want to do a play about the women that survive this. What happens to them. Their story,” she told me. “And I want you to write it.” It wasn’t much to go on, but Amy wasn’t asking for it any time soon. I told her I’d think about it, and promptly forgot about it.

The real connection to Knoxville, and hence the real motivation to make this play happen, didn’t come until Amy read an article commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Fraterville mine disaster of 1902, near what is now Lake City in Anderson County. Suddenly Wakefield Widow became real for us. Now there was history to explore—actual places to go, people to talk to, original documents to study. Amy called me up again and told me she wanted her Wakefield widow’s play, to now be based on the Fraterville mine disaster. This time she was putting it in the brochure for the next actors Co-op season, which made it official. I told her I’d think about it, and I got to work.

The Coal Creek Project, our working title for the play, proved to be one of the most challenging things I’ve ever worked on as a writer. There were resources available to tell me about the mine explosion. I had newspaper accounts of the explosion from 1902, letters that some of the trapped miners had written to their families as they awaited a rescue that never came, books written by rescue miners, books written by historians—even a local expert in Barry Thacker of the Coal Creek Watershed Foundation. There were field trips, too—to the site of the old Fraterville Mine, to the cemetery where most of the miners are buried, and 250 feet under the ground and two miles deep into a working coal mine to understand some part of that life. (An unnerving experience.)

Not surprisingly, almost all the information I had focused on the men who lost their lives. But what of the women and children? Certainly they were victims too, though of a very different kind. Beyond a few rather sensational mentions in the Knoxville Sentinel that week (“Wife of Foreman George Atkins Loses Her Mind, So Intense Is Her Grief: Many women are almost insensible to animate beings”) there was little information about what these women and children did in the days and weeks after the disaster. What happened to this community? Where did they go? What did they do? How did the women and children survive this disaster? For the very reason that they had been neglected, these would become the central questions of our play.

But more challenging than the dearth of information regarding the survivors was the way in which the play was to be written. From the start, the Coal Creek Project had been designed as a workshop. It was to be a collaborative effort between director Kara Kemp, the acting company, and myself. The play was to evolve naturally out of sessions where the actors explored the research material and responded to it dramatically. I wasn’t supposed to enter with preconceived ideas about story, characters or themes. Ordinarily, that’s not how I operate. I like to plot things out. Link themes and events as I discover them. Plan ahead. Nevertheless, I gamely swallowed ideas about narrative structure and subtext as they popped unbidden into my head during my research.

Instead I focused on what the actors were doing in the workshops. Simple gestures of comfort, grief and alienation became significant moments in the story. Pieces of monologues the actors wrote to explore their favorite characters became dialogue in the final script. Recurring themes like darkness, breathing, and community became central tenets of our play.

After a few months of workshops, I delivered a first draft. Much of the way the play is presented comes from the actors and their work, but for the story, I returned to the source material. Because the miners who died in the explosion are the heart and soul of this tragedy, I gave them a voice through monologues delivered in the dark. For the survivors’ tale, I found that there was a woman who lost five boys in the disaster and who was quoted in the Sentinel as saying “I have got so trouble is kinder welcome. If I did not have some new trouble once in a while, I would feel that I had been forgotten.” I built an extended family around her, peopling it with combinations of anecdotes mentioned only in passing in the research. Real characters are with us, too: the foreman’s wife who loses her mind “so intense is her grief,” a famed rescue miner from Jellico who worked nonstop for four days and nights. I even based one character on the real-life grandmother of a woman we met on a company field trip to Briceville.

One or two major revisions later (actors love having to highlight all their lines again and rewrite all their blocking notes), we had a play we were thrilled with. What we didn’t have was a title, but that would come. For me began the best part of writing a play—sitting back and listening to talented actors give life to my words. But the Coal Creek Project was to afford me an even greater thrill. Amy Hubbard had the foresight to recruit Sarah Pirkle and Jeff Barbra, the musicians responsible for Wakefield Widow (and consequently this whole mess), to create original music for our play. I have never been so honored as a writer than the night Sarah and Jeff played an amazing new song they had written based on a character I had written. It was a magical moment for me, and it was to be repeated again and again as they gave us more new songs, all born out of the characters, settings and themes of the play.

In that first new song we came full circle, for it was there that we finally found our title: