Courting Catharsis

(Gerard Stropnicky spent a week watching rehearsals of "Steelbound.")

When you enter the site, check your expectations at the gate. I was about to say "at the door," but there is no door. Nor is there a theater. This is an 1863 iron foundry in ruins. Cruciform in shape, it is a cathedral of the industrial age. The enormous structure stands amid the rubble of a shuttered industry. The now silent furnaces that for more than a century belched smoke and sparks and the steel that literally built a nation tower in the distance.

As the cast of nearly 60 gathers, more surprises. They range in age from eight to nearly 90. They are all colors, all shapes, and many actually worked here. Some are still angry. Most are eager to celebrate their story. All hope to find some way to mark the events that ended a way of life. Under the guidance of Bill Rauch, artistic director of Cornerstone Theater from Los Angeles, and under the auspices of an ambitious Steel Festival conceived and produced by Touchstone Theatre of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, they have gathered on this historic, haunted ground to create a ceremony of closure. The people of a community in crisis have come together to sing about their past, their loss, their pride and their fears for the future. They are courting catharsis.

Bill George as Prometheus in "Steelbound," photo by Ysaye Barnwell

These are bodies found in nature. These are not professional performer bodies honed by days at the gym. There are round women and barrel-chested men. Broad shoulders. Aged spines. Yet not once does the director have to say, "Now, how might a steelworker walk? How would he handle the welding torch?" No, here the community performers are the font of knowledge. Bill Rauch knows to listen with patience and respect.

These are faces full of strength and history, more than any make-up artist could create. While the knowledge that "these are the real people" adds to the audience's experience of the work in performance, it facilitates a community understanding before, during and after the work that is simply not possible in any other way. If the message is one of community healing, should not then the medium be the community in need of healing? The casting is deliberate. The community collaborates with the professionals on a play close to its heart.

Bill George, a Touchstone founder and an accomplished professional actor, climbs the nine feet to the top of the 27-and-a-half ton ladle where he will spend the next hours as Prometheus in "Steelbound." The plays is Alison Carey's adaptation of Aeschylus' "Prometheus Bound," transformed to tell the story of shackles of steel and their ultimate release. A much younger, more confused Bill George, back in his "ran-out-of-money-to-go-to-college" days, spent 18 months in the heat and noise and smell of "the Steel." Like the other former steelworkers, now actors, who work out the business of welding him to the ladle, Bill's blood is red with iron dust, dark with carbon. Now he serves as one of the key artists assembled to bring shape to this quest for catharsis.

About that ladle: Lynn Jeffries, set designer for Cornerstone Theater, was on a tour of what was left of the Bethlehem Steel plant, looking for items that might serve the environment of the play. In one building was a collection of the enormous devices once used to pour molten steel into forms. In her most innocent voice, she asked her Beth Steel host, "Do you think we could use one of those?" A week later, a crew of 20 men maneuvered a crane hoisting this monumental icon of the steel industr y to the production site. The caption to the picture of this operation that appears in Allentown's Morning Call reads, "Prop moved for play." Lynn says, with an ironic smile and a shrug, "You never know unless you ask."

Like the event, the site, the cast and the script, this outsized effort is another ingredient for community catharsis. Its sheer size serves as a mark of respect: It shouts to all who would listen that what happened here is important, and that it will take something very large indeed to rightfully mark its passing. The list of collaborators is staggering. Besides the two professional ensemble theater companies, and the large community cast, collaborators include composer Ysaye Barnwell, co-founder of the renowned Gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Then there are Bethlehem Steel, The City of Bethlehem, Lehigh University, Godfrey Daniels Coffee House, a dozen community churches and the United Steel Workers Union. The costume designer comes from Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, and the lighting designer from the Irondale Ensemble Project in New York. The effort represents months and years of collaboration and compromise. The involvement and investment of the community is so massive, so wide-ranging, so damned expensive, that with each decision, each argument, each resolution, and each "coming on board," expectations rise. Ostensibly, they gather to make a theater production, but what they are building is hope. Hope for release, absolution, deliverance. Catharsis. On one level, by the time the piece opens, it has already succeeded—it has built an ad-hoc community coalition assembled to assuage its pain.

In a project like "Steelbound," each and every word carries portent. A rehearsal back at Touchstone's space has both Touchstone's Jennie Gilrain and Bill Rauch working with the women's chorus. The rehearsal stops when one woman, tears in her eyes, asks, "Bill, when does this get happy? The closing of the Steel was so sad, will people want to live through all this again?" The conversation that ensues is deep, important, careful. When they return to the scene, a breakthrough has occurred. They are freed to speak from their hearts.

The same conversation is happening in every corner of this project. Earlier that afternoon, Lynn Jeffries, the Cornerstone designer, said, "Yes, it's a funeral. Bethlehem Steel is dead in this community, dead and gone. But we can make a really good funeral! At a really good funeral, people do cry. And there is anger. But at a really good funeral, we laugh too. We remember the good times together. The accomplishments. The friendships and love. Then and only then can we go on. This town has had a death, but it never had the funeral. Maybe 'Steelbound' can be that." Community and artists, collaborating, courting catharsis. The conversation is the project.

So, did it work? "Steelbound"'s entire run was sold out, and the project was blessed with coverage by PBS, and a feature on CBS Sunday Morning. But community catharsis can't be measured in traditional ways—it doesn't even wait for the performance. It begins when the idea begins, and it grows and takes hold throughout the courtship. It grows with each new level of commitment. It buds as members of the community nourish it with their hope and participation. It flowers as it is embraced. A community in crisis actively searches for ways to respond to that crisis. Ethical artists with a sincere commitment to community can sculpt an opportunity: a ceremony pure in focus, honest in intent, unsparing and true; a union and a reunion, a raising of voice. If it happens at all, community catharsis happens in the hearts of individuals. It happened in "Steelbound."

Gerard Stropnicky is a director, actor, designer and founding member of Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, a community-centered professional theater company in rural Bloomsburg, Pa., where he has worked for 23 years. At BTE he conceived and directed "Letters to the Editor," a portrait of community created from 200 years of letters to local newspapers, now available through Baker's Plays. He has twice directed productions for Touchstone Theatre.

Original CAN/API publication: October 1999