CORIOLANUS 

Welcome to the 2024 Summer Shakespeare Residency performance at the Colerain Center for Education, Preservation, and the Arts. This is our second year producing a performance like this one.

This project has always felt like an insane, almost masochistic idea. We have a single week to produce the entire show; that includes sourcing and fitting costumes, arranging and rehearsing music, choreographing fights and practicing them enough that they can be safely performed, developing motivations and strategies for each character, then rehearsing it so that it’s polished enough to present. Through lots of communication, we must strike a balance between giving the production enough time to develop and be rehearsed in 5 days, while also making sure that the cast doesn’t wear out.

We’ve been living at the historic mansion since Sunday, June 9. In that time, we’ve become a close group of friends, eating our meals together and spending the evenings playing games and running around the grounds, before waking up the next morning for more rehearsal. The community created through an undertaking like this one is something special, and it more than makes up for the stress and effort that goes into making it happen.

When choosing what play to produce, the first thing I asked myself is what I wanted to say with the performance. One year ago, the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) was on strike, and the Screen Actors’ Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Arts (SAG-AFTRA) would follow a day before our rehearsals began. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) was in talks to begin their own strike. I wanted to stand with them in my own way, and chose Coriolanus to say my piece about labor rights in the United States. Since then, corporations have become more powerful and aggressive in the oppression of their employees, and the opening argument of the citizens—that everyone deserves corn to eat—becomes more and more poignant. The show you’re about to see is an adaptation; not every production of this play will be politically charged in the same way.

Coriolanus contains more than two sides, however. Historically, Rome was a global military superpower, conquering nearly anyone they wanted to. In this production, they are a poor group of rebels during the tragic Coal Wars of the early 20th Century, struggling to form and facilitate their own organization against the dominating force of the Volsces, who I’ve cast as the mine owners and coal barons. This particular interpretation is a liberty unique to public domain plays, and I’ve used it to highlight the violence inherent in the way corporations view employees as a component of doing business rather than as individual humans. In Coriolanus, infighting among the factions of Rome brings their downfall as much as the Volsces do, and the Volsces use that conflict to their advantage. Throughout the production, there are songs about the dangers and inequities faced by the miners, singing the plight of the people against the inhumane working conditions of the coal mines and the deadly military force used to keep them in line. The songs emphasize the importance of unity against the violence of capitalism.

As you watch this play, remember the history of protests and riots that gave us the 40-hour work week with weekends, that outlawed pay via scrip, and improved workplace safety. Regulations like those are written in blood.

Thank you for coming. I encourage everyone to read the dramaturgy materials in the rest of the program.

In solidarity,

MARY ROSE VALENTINE

Director of Theatre

Colerain Center for Education, Preservation, and the Arts 

Shakespeare's Coriolanus: History, Stage, and Criticism

Coriolanus was first published in the 1623 First Folio, the first published collected works of Shakespeare, which passed its 400th anniversary last year. Shakespeare adapted Thomas North's influential translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans from the late 16th century, which also served as the source material for the other two plays in Shakespeare's trilogy of Roman tragedies, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The play's writing likely emerged from King James's trouble with parliament, the hunger and popular unrest in the Midlands in 1607, and the grain shortage of 1608. 

Though one of Shakespeare's lesser-performed works, Coriolanus is arguably Shakespeare's most overtly political play, which has yielded a rich history of adaptations, productions, and criticism over the centuries. Shakespeare's text sports a productive ambiguity that invites varied interpretations on the nature of democracy, class conflict, rhetoric as performance, masculinist militarism, and citizenship as right versus privilege. Stagings in the twentieth-century reflected the tragedy's widespread relevance in an era of catastrophic political events. Partisan interpretations included French reception to the Comédie-Française's 1933-34 production, which suggested that fascism could eliminate government corruption, and Bertolt Brecht's unfinished, 1952 Marxist adaptation that depicted the plebeians as sympathetic and the tribunes as less self-serving. Coriolanus is a play familiar to strong adaptational choices, variously portraying the plebeians, tribunes, and/or patricians as sympathetic.

Critical approaches to Shakespeare's play have included: psychoanalytic assessments of the relationship between mother and son and of early modern anxieties of the corruption of masculine virtue by the maternal body; political and scientific comparisons between the vulnerability of the human body and that of the body-politic of the state; and post-structuralist evaluations of the role of speech and "voices" in the play, inspecting how communication in society is the means of democratic participation. 

The West Virginia Coal Wars (1912-1921)

Our production locates Shakespeare's class conflict amidst the historical labour movement of the West Virginia mine wars. In 1912 to 1921, coal miners went on strike multiple times to protest the working and housing conditions inflicted by mine operators; miners suffered high fatality rates, were ensured the country's weakest safety laws, and contended with unfair working conditions, including low pay, long hours, and the exploitation that accompanied living in company-owned towns. Mine operators responded to these calls for reform by hiring mine guards from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, a private security firm, to violently suppress strike activity. The tyranny and violence of the mine guard system was co-signed by support from state government and forces, while the United Mine Workers (UMW) lent their support to the strikers. 

The conflict reached a climax in August 1921, when miners came face-to-face with state forces. Anticipating heavy bloodshed, renowned labor organizer Mary "Mother" Jones attempted to persuade the miners to return home, but the miners marched on into the southern coalfields that night. For three days, the two sides battled with gatling guns, rifles, and other firearms along the ridge of Blair Mountain. On the second day of fighting, the sheriff ordered fly airplanes to drop two gas bombs and two bombs filled with gunpowder, nuts, and bolts over encamped marchers; historian James Green explains: “Something extraordinary happened on Spruce Fork Ridge that day: American citizens were being subjected to aerial bombardment on their own soil.” When government troops were dispatched, the miners surrendered, as it was not the federal government that they were protesting but rather the local and state governments that served mining interests over ensuring the citizens their constitutional rights. 

Though the state attempted to bring charges of treason against miners for their role in the battle, they were acquitted. Organized labor—including from industries other than coal—funded the defense, and the national news coverage and wider labor movement understood the verdict as not just acquittal for the miners, but as a guilty verdict for the state. With UMW's resources depleted of support after the trial, it was only the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the passage of the labor-friendly New Deal laws (1933-1938) which allowed West Virginia coal workers to finally gain the right to fully unionize. The West Virginia mine wars have earned a looming legacy in American labor history, in part due to their immense violence.

Coriolanus Today: Labor Movements and Democracy

We encounter Shakespeare's tragedy today, in a world familiar to history. The high-profile strikes and unionization efforts of contemporary labor movements—such as those of the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW), Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), United Parcel Service (UPS), Starbucks, and Amazon—have turned the national conversation towards workers' rights. The upcoming presidential election (and the haunting phantom of the past two) have shown the necessity of American society to interrogate the dangers of populism when electing representatives in a democracy. An increasingly digital world has picked up the pace of communication, making increasingly apparent the widening inequality between the haves and the have-nots within the country, a gap that is only exacerbated by rising costs of living.

The questions that Coriolanus inspires are not historical but evergreen. As Katharine Eisan Maus articulates: 

What ought to be the relationship between the common people and the elite? Who is entitled to a voice in the running of the state, and on what basis is that voice granted: class status? personal merit? place of residence? Does citizenship, as Coriolanus argues, primarily entail duties such as military service? Or is citizenship, as many of the common people assume, essentially a set of entitlements and privileges? How does the state determine its domestic and military priorities? These are not merely questions for ancient Rome, but recur in any political community.

Though elitist and bordering on tyrannical, Martius/Coriolanus sports a distrust of rhetoric that every healthy democracy must contend with; how do we trust a collective voice when collective thought can be swayed by the power of language, voice, and personality, irregardless of the ethicality of their content or intent? Shakespeare's play invites a metatheatricality as we consider how the characters participating in the public discourse are all actors speaking to persuade their respective audiences—all save for Martius, who only speaks and only trusts speech that seeks to express. In 2024's America, Coriolanus offers us both an opportunity to reflective on the power of a collective voice and a warning of the personal and political tragedy that can befall when progress yields to pride. 

— ARUSHI GROVER, Dramaturg

Sources

Donaldson, Rachel. “Series: West Virginia Mine Wars.” National Park Service.

Donaldson, Rachel and Maxwell Sickler. “The West Virginia Mine Wars: An American Labor Conflict in Appalachia.” National Park Service. 

Griffith, Huw. "The Critical Backstory" in Coriolanus: A Critical Reader, 2021, pp. 15-44.

Holderness, Graham. "State of the Art", in Coriolanus: A Critical Reader, 2021, pp. 71-94. 

Holland, Peter. Introduction to Coriolanus, by William Shakespeare. The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, 2013, pp. 1-141. 

Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Introduction to Coriolanus in The Norton Shakespeare, 2016, pp. 2933-2940. 

Ormsbury, Robert. "Performance History" in Coriolanus: A Critical Reader, 2021, pp. 45-70. 

Semler, Liam E. Introduction to Coriolanus: A Critical Reader, 2021, pp. 1-14.