Fire Damp, page 5

Community members and parents came out to share their expertise and to provide their labour: King Cole gave us the use of his recording studio and his skills as a musician; Gerry Bjerke made picks and battery packs out of wood; I consulted Oscar Odney about the old songs we needed and he taught Louis (Riley McKinnon) to play them on the guitar; Nella Sjogren helped with the costume design and alterations; parents brought treats for the cast and made donations; Blaine Pontarolo, chief of the Coalhurst Volunteer Fire Department, found a massive old fire hose for us-in fact, it could have been the one used in the fire of '34.

People with no connection to Coalhurst came out to help: Wendy Hoff turned the eight rowdy miners into a male-voice choir, Charlene Dyck taught the slam-dancing generation the old-time waltz, members of the Galt No. 8 Historical Society helped to spread the word, Jeremy Youngward ran the lights, and my entire family did their bit (it was my only chance to see them, after all). Everyone lent costume pieces. By the time we reached completion, well over a hundred people could say they had helped to make it all work. In fact, it was the only way it could work. The story had captured them too.

Students took on lots of jobs, from painting to ticket cutting. Mike Bedster and John Betts were stage crew, Scott Soenen, a grade twelve audiophile, ran the sound, and, Of course, there were the dressers. Real challenges were the costume and make-up changes. Each character of the 22-member cast had at least three changes, but there were a few that were phenomenal. Andy (Tim Sandham) enacted Johnny Walker's famous ride down the Dump in a tire (we actually had one from a Model A), and had to appear in a duplicate costume, ripped and tom and covered in chicken feathers. But the worst were the miners. Eight coal miners had to be changed repeatedly from dirty to clean and back to dirty again. This required dressers backstage, and students Angie Sheppard and Kim Walker headed that department. They could completely transform any miner from blackened pit condition to Dapper Dan in under thirty seconds by the time we reached performance.

The change in the students was, for me, the most rewarding of all. Somehow through the drudgery of rehearsal and the constant discussion about what we were all trying to say, they came to understand better than anyone the lives and times of the people they were portraying. Long before their performances gained an impressive professionalism and polish, they had heart. No one who heard Louis (Riley McKinnon) sing "Dark as a Dungeon" will ever forget it and after the first time we ran the funeral scene no one felt much like talking for a while.

One day in late April, a lady stopped the local restaurant and asked if there was anyone in town who could tell her about the Coalhurst Mining Disaster. She had come from Vancouver Island to lay flowers on the grave of the father she had never known. He had been killed in the blast when she was only two.

Thankfully she found me and consented to come and speak to my cast. While she sat on the set surrounded by the students, she told them how the only thing her mother could bear to speak of was that night standing at the mouth of the mine with her baby in her arms, waiting to see if she was a widow before she was twenty-five. The timing was uncanny. We had rehearsed the pithead scene for the first time two days earlier.

We opened in our gymnasium in Coalhurst. The audience response overwhelmed us. It became apparent the first night that we had, in fact, done something truly special. We had done something more than just create a high school play. Like the characters we were depicting, we had come together with a common vision, and now our audience had joined us. As one lady from Lethbridge said, "To see these people in the lobby with their chest puffed out-it made you want to be from Coalhurst."

Students in the school began asking their parents about their great-grandparents. An amazing number were descended from the very kind of people we had brought to life on stage. After the encore ther cast would introduce special people whom we knew were in the audience-Johnny Walker, of course, whose twinkle in the eye still shows that he's probably make that Dump ride again in a flash. And one night Helen Forenz stood up. She was born on the day of the disaster and her father had cancelled his shift that day in order to attend her birth. She had been referred to in the play as the "miracle baby." Through their comments, both spoken and written, the sons and daughters of coal miners made known to us how they felt. Some came three or four times.

Firedamp ran eight performances of full houses at three separate venues in May and June. When the performances had concluded, one parent commented: "You know, this has made me realise that, as parents, we are not alone-that a child is raised by a community." After one performance, when the actors had taken their bows, they called me up to the stage and kindly presented me with a bouquet of yellow roses. Jeff, who played Tom, nodded toward the roses and whispered, "They're symbolic, you know." I looked puzzled, but understood when he said, "Count 'em. Count the roses. There's 16 of them."

Firedamp: How the Creation of a Play about a Disaster Rekindled Community in Coalhurst