This multi-media performance portrays lfe in the coal fields of Appalachia where men and women chain themselves to heavy machinery as they try to stop mountaintop removal mining, and where others try to protect, sometimes violently, jobs the mining industry provides.
The play is loosely inspired by Jeff Bigger’s newly released book, Reckoning at Eagle Creek, the Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland. Based at the home of Marie and Hovie, a young couple living in the mountain holler of Eagle Creek, the play chronicles their attemps to come to grips with their conflicting fates, when their 150-year-old homestead is threatened by a planned mountaintop removal operation.
With a backdrop of film montages and historically-based satirical faux-mercials by filmmaker/actor Ben Evans. “Welcome to the Saudi Arabia of Coal” is a rare journey into the lives of those on the coalfield frontlines, and an entertaining, informative and illuminating theatrical production on the true cost of mountaintop removal and coal mining to our land and citizenry.
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