 |
|
Appalachian |
What would have been the point of encouraging people to talk if you weren't going to talk about the tough issues, the hard things? This is what people long for and need - to discuss, to talk, to have a relatively free space to just say and ask it and somebody is going to hear you instead of hanging you As a Community, we need to work on Communication
The culminating event of the Harlan County Project was the opening of the original community drama Higher Ground in the Godbey Appalachian Center theater in Cumberland in the fall of 2005. In collaboration with director Gerard Stropnicky and playwright Jo Carson, the community coalition created a script for Higher Ground out of oral histories collected specifically for the project. The play dealt head-on with the issue of prescription drug abuse and drew on the network created by the rest of the Harlan County Project.
Higher Ground’s
characters include an
elderly man who begins selling pain pills to pay his bills and is
murdered for his medicine; a miner who becomes an OxyContin addict
after suffering a coal mining injury; and the miner’s 12-year-old
son who has to prevent his mother, the miner’s wife, from shooting
him after his addiction spirals out of control.
Hard stories like these are surrounded
by stories of how families have gotten through tough times and how
the community has pulled together in the past during floods.
The play looked at prescription drug
abuse as another type of flood, and explored how the communion
people have traditionally shared in the flood shelter provides a
metaphor for how we might address the flood of pills washing through
the community now.
We just didn't have the medicine floating around in my times Pam, the part I played, is a young woman addicted to pills. The judge asked her what she was doing in court, since she was from a 'good' family...Her heart broke for the other offenders in the courtroom. As I spoke, I knew someone in the audience had experienced what Pam had...The glistening eyes that Pam saw were the same eyes I saw staring at me. I knew I had been humbled as tears filled my eyes..." The play was a
resounding artistic and popular success when it was
presented to the public in the fall of 2005 and
2006.
The music in particular moved the audience.
The play included seventeen musical numbers,
many of them choreographed, and included several
songs composed by local people specifically for
Higher
Ground. I called my relatives in Corbin and told them they had to come see this play.. It was nice for them to come back to Harlan for something positive The cast of Higher Ground made it clear in the discussion after the play that they weren't just getting together to sing a song and feel good... The show’s cast of seventy-five local people ranged in age from two to eighty. The cast spanned a wide range of income brackets, included white folk and black folk, tee-totallers and substance abusers in all stages of recovery. I was part of the Higher Ground chorus. All of these people became like a second family. I couldn't believe how great we worked together. I believe we can work together outside of the play helping the community. We all had a neighborly love for each other. The audience had similar demographics and the community embraced the show’s discussion of the drug crisis, in part because of the way the play dealt with the crisis from a position of cultural strength. After seeing Higher Ground, many audience members brought their friends and relatives who have moved away back home to see the show. What was originally perceived by the community as a local entertainment became the impetus for a homecoming—and for discussion of an issue critical to the future of our community. It feels really good to see the enthusiasm of people recording and performing stories. They believed that maybe if they told the stories just right and performed just right, then maybe they could help the community |
Galleries
|
 |
Godbey
Appalachian Center |