This year’s fall performance is part play, part musical, part documentary — and U-High will be the first high school to tackle its complex premise. “Coal Country” tells the story of a town in West Virginia after the real-world Upper Big Branch Mining Disaster in 2010, which killed 29 people. The creators of the play based it on interviews of survivors and loved ones.
U-High Theater will perform “Coal Country” on Nov. 13-15, the first production of this play portrayed by a high school. The play’s creator has been confirmed as a guest.
Jessica Blank, a co-writer of “Coal Country,” will run a workshop with the actors and give a talk before the performance.
Matt Boresi, U-High theater director, hopes to live up to the writer’s standards.
“It’s certainly keeping us on our toes to make sure that we’re doing a good job and being respectful in the piece,” Mr. Boresi said.
Mia Lane, a junior, will play Tommy, a miner who loses a son in the disaster. She feels that there is pressure on the cast to do justice to the author as well as the people the play is based on.
“We’ve been doing more direct research because these people are alive,” she said. “These are living, real people. And that also adds another layer of pressure.”
Mr. Boresi saw “Coal Country” as a window for U-High students into others’ lives.
“I think that one of the great values of theater is that it allows us to share human experiences that are not necessarily our own,” he said. “It will expand your sense of humanity to see what happened to the folks in coal country for us as humans who feel for humans who are on some level different from us, on some level the same as us.”
Mia stressed the importance of the play to the school’s audience, many of whom have privileges that the characters and the people they are based on do not.
“I think getting outside of the bubble, hearing the stories of people who are not like you, is a very valuable thing, especially for kids at this school,” she said. “To realize that the world is so much more complex and intricate and difficult than your incredibly sheltered life has shown you. And I think everyone here needs a wake-up call.”
In response to a surge of interest in theater, “Coal Country” will be the first U-High production to have separate performances by two casts — Mr. Boresi describes them as varsity and junior varsity. Mr. Boresi emphasized that he wanted to give more students the opportunity to perform.
“This is an educational program, and we want to serve as many students as possible,” he said. “If people want to learn how to do theater here, my job is to teach them.”
He also noted that the two levels weren’t an indication of the skill level of the actors or the quality of the production, but more a split based on grade, with varsity being made up mostly of juniors and seniors, while junior varsity represents ninth graders and sophomores.
“I encourage anybody who’s got two nights free to see both, because it’s not an A cast and a B cast,” Mr. Boresi said. “I think they’ll both be wonderful, and I think that every performance will be different than their counterpart and worth seeing.”
