Butcher Holler Here We Come
Opening Night: July 24, 2015
Closing: August 2, 2015
Theater: The Tank
1973, West Virginia. Following a cave collapse, 5 coal miners struggle to survive the dwindling supply of oxygen, the lack of food and water, the unraveling sense of passing time, and, even more threatening, their own competing natures. Brutally weaving through family histories, complicated friendships, crooked politics, childhood visions, audacious hopes, eerie dreams, criminal addictions, and fervent spirituality in this run-of-the-mill Appalachian community, Butcher Holler Here We Come is a descent into the male psyche-in-crisis where secret desires, carnal urges, and hidden memories come boiling to the surface in a primitive territory of Earth that mirrors the subliminal mind.
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July 26, 2015
Darkness can be thoroughly disorienting, a fact that the performance collective Aztec Economy uses to advantage in “Butcher Holler Here We Come,” at the Tank in Midtown. The play, about a fictional mining disaster in West Virginia, is lighted entirely with headlamps worn by the actors, and sometimes it isn’t lighted at all. That makes for a jarring piece of theater, though this one would be better if it were clearer in ways that have nothing to do with the illumination. It is 1973 and the playwright, Casey Wimpee, gives us five men trapped underground by a cave-in whose cause becomes part of the tale that unspools in the dim light. One man might already be dead. Another has a lung disease, and a third suffers bouts of what sound like hiccups. At first they respond to their predicament as miners might. There is praying. There is storytelling to serve as a distraction, about ghosts and an Indian tribe and the mythical creature Sheepsquatch.
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