Trilogy finally a trilogy!

My 'Miners Trilogy' is finally a trilogy! After a false start or three, the third play is now in the can and I have submitted it to a couple of places, with more submissions in the offing. I'm not at this point submitting as three plays, just submitting play three to competitions.

The next step is to put together a nice letter of introduction and send it to any theater company I can think of and we'll see where it sticks . . . if anywhere.

At any rate, this didn't start out to be a trilogy; I just wrote a play about coal miners on the picket line during a strike, because it always seemed like a situation ripe with possibility. Even when I started to write the second play, it didn't seem like a trilogy to me, then, out of nowhere it hit me . . . why not . . . I even kind of had the idea for the basics of the third play ... it just took a while to get it right.

The plays are only linked because they are about coal miners and I wrote them; the only recurring character is Beulah who owns a miners-friendly bar (she is in the first and third play, and mentioned in the second). The other link is music . . . in the first two plays not only do the titles come from songs (That Lonesome Valley and Where the Rain Never Falls) but the songs are actually sung. So to round out the concept I had to come up with a third song and decided on Working Man Blues (by Merle Haggard - though in this case the song isn't sung in the play).

Each play takes a look at a different aspect of what these guys face: the hardships of a strike in TLV, the dangers inherent in mining in Rain, and what happens to these guys, who for generations have depended on the industry, when the jobs go away in Working Man Blues.

They also stand alone, you don't have to know TLV or Rain to enjoy Working Man Blues.

So it has been a long time since I wrote That Lonesome Valley in 2000, and Where the Rain Never Falls in 2004 . . . well . . . as Jerry says in The Zoo Story: Sometimes you have to go a long way out of you way to go a short way correctly (I paraphrase).

I was still working at The Village Voice when I started TLV!