ONLINE BUFFALO REVIEW 11/27/08Drop Hammer
By Augustine Warner REVIEWER FOR SPEAKUPWNY.COM
The company has just built a new plant in Kentucky and workers think they will
be replaced with cheaper, non-union workers in the Bluegrass State.
Union members suspect the financial secretary has been spending the treasury
as if it were his own and there isn't much left.
The union organizer is
under attack as an alleged Communist, with a local evening newspaper leading
the charge.
In the background is the constant pounding of the industrial hammer used to
shape metal in the plant, the drop hammer essentially pounding out paychecks.
It's Manny Fried's "DROP HAMMER" being staged by the
Subversive Theatre Collective in (drum roll) The Manny Fried Playhouse.
Fried's plays tend to be autobiographical and "DROP HAMMER"
is no exception, with his history as a leftist union organizer being
undermined by the media and the F.B.I., with a rich brother-in-law and artist
wife.
Here the plant is never named, but it's in the Black Rock-Riverside section of
Buffalo, an area littered today with the debris of a rich industrial plant
which once provided thousands of good, union jobs.
As with so many industrial shops, there's a bar used as the hangout for the
workers.
Here it's Louie's where union meetings and the events of the play take place
and the owner (Leon S. Copeland Jr.) tries not to keep track of what's going
on.
At the heart of the production is Victor Morales' troubled Carl Morgan, the
financial secretary with a drinking problem and a certainty the plant will be
closed and the production moved South.
Morales is wonderful, in a very different role from last year's "WAITING
FOR LEFTY," where he played the corrupt union leader Harry Fatt
trying to block a taxi strike.
The difference is that Carl Morgan is a working man while Fatt never seems to
get his suit dirty.
Union President Stanley Gorski (David A. Hoffman) is trying to deal with all
of this and he's over his head and he knows that when he was financial
secretary he took from the treasury.
Organizer Dave Sigmund (Tim Eimiller) is dealing with every possible problem
and the circling vulture reporter Sully (David Sterlace) probing the union and
what's going on. I think he's based on a reporter I knew.
Morgan is drinking to deal with his union and personal problems and his wife
Mildred (Betsy Bittar) wants out.
Events keep tightening, with all of the problems of the officers exacerbated
by the worried union members, especially Howie Evans (Marshall Maxwell) and
Bill Payne (Tom Izard), two of "the four shouters."
Morgan isn't the only drinker, with Kewpie Fleischauer (Kevin Dennis) passing
out in Louie's.
Eventually, Sigmund has to make the call and bring in the accountant Frank
Ryan (Jack Agugliaro) from headquarters and he quickly finds out there is
money missing and he interrogates Morgan.
The thieving union official stalks the room, trying to charm his way out of
the mess and Ryan just won't let him since he's been here before with others
in Morgan's position.
Fried leaves the story
unfinished, since we never learn if the plant will close and the pounding of
the drop hammer will stop and the metal cool.
"DROP HAMMER" is a freeze frame of a time and a place,
although if you go not so far away to the GM Powertrain plant or Delphi in
Lockport the story will sound very familiar. That's why it's worth
seeing, Fried applying the lessons of drama to the lessons of his union past
in "DROP HAMMER."
Director Kurt Schneiderman is working with some strong material and some
strong cast members, especially Morales, Maxwell, Izard, Agugliaro and
Copeland.
Fried's plays won't be of interest to many people but there aren't many
probing life in the working classes and putting the result on stage.
It's valuable.
AUGUSTINE WARNER.
|
