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Playwright tells story of a family dealing with steel industry's decline
Wednesday, August 22, 2001 By A.J. Caliendo
We all have our own way of dealing with the tough times. Some turn to friends and family; some to religion; some, sadly, to chemicals.
Most of us will at some point throw a hefty dose of self-delusion into the mix. That is especially true if the problem threatens long-term consequences.
Those of us who were in Pittsburgh when the mighty steel industry began to crumble know better than most about convincing ourselves everything will turn out all right, even when all the evidence says otherwise.
Playwright James McManus of Squirrel Hill was just a child in the mid to late '70s, when the smokestacks started to fall. But he remembers.
He remembers hearing the whistle blow at the Babcock and Wilcox mill that stood near his home in Donora, remembers the parade of men with lunch pails walking past his house on their way to answer the whistle's call, remembers how the layoffs in '76 and '77 affected first his neighbors, then his own family. He remembers the optimism of those displaced workers who insisted the lull was only temporary, and the despair when they realized it was not.
In fact, the memory of men and women creating childlike fantasies to insulate themselves from the inevitable is so vivid for McManus that he has made it one of the central themes in his play, "The Night They Drugged the Orange." The play runs through Sept. 2 at the Red Barn Theater in Hampton.
The play, which got a reading at the Gemini New Play Festival in Point Breeze earlier this year, takes place in the Pittsburgh-area back yard of the fictional Ahern family. McManus said he wants his audiences to feel they were eavesdropping on a family's personal crisis.
That crisis, he says, is sparked by the refusal of some characters to accept impending disaster.
"A lot of [the play] is about delusion," McManus said. He points out that Pittsburgh and its decimated steel industry are a metaphor for the actual point of his play. "People I knew didn't believe the steel mills would close, [but] I imagine the same thing happened in other places with other jobs."
His hope is that the audience will recognize a universality in the foibles exhibited by his characters, and not just see it as a play about a Pittsburgh family.
The second focus, McManus said, is based on the dynamic that he observed between the generations in the steel towns throughout Western Pennsylvania. There was an expectation that a son would follow his father into the mill, just as surely as a prince succeeded his father to the throne.
"The job was almost a birthright," he said. "You were afraid to tell your parents that you weren't going into the mill."
McManus said the son of the play's central character spends much of the play questioning why he was selected to matriculate in the family "business," while his brother was given his father's blessing to attend college and follow another path.
Given the fact that the playwright comes from a family of steelworkers in a mill town, can the audience assume that the comedy/drama is autobiographical? McManus laughed.
"When you're writing, you think it's 100 percent fictional," he said, "but later, you realize that there is a lot of you or someone you know in the characters." After a lengthy pause, he added, "I guess that's the writer's delusion."
A.J. Caliendo is a free-lance writer.
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