For nearly seven years Butcher Holler Here We Come played live in more than 18 cities across the United States then, in March this year, when America was still very uncertain how Coronavirus would impact its society and economy, the company embarked upon their first international tour.

Originally scheduled to play at Wellington’s BATS Theatre at the end of the NZ Fringe, from 19-28 March, after a short season in Sydney Australia and before going to the Dunedin Fringe, the production got caught in the slow but increasingly serious drift of COVID 19 containment policies. Just in time they made a digital recording of it at BATS then each actor individually self-recorded additional material while under quarantine. Co-ordinating, editing and post-producing it has been a challenge and now it’s available online throughout the Easter weekend.

It has also been a challenge for viewers without high-speed fibre to watch it without the frustration of intermittent and sometimes sustained buffering. Erin persisted to the best of her ability and sent her notes (i.e. most of what follows) to John who watched it without problems in order to validate her perceptions. “Strangely, the problems I had buffering meant that I spent more time up close and personal with the characters and the imagery that I would have otherwise,” Erin reports. “I’m sure that anyone who is able to access this using fibre will get a lot out of it – especially if they listen with headphones.”

Although Casey Wimpee’s play is set in a collapsed mine in West Virginia, in 1972, it is not a docudrama about that tragic event. It uses the trapped-in-the-dark circumstances of five coal miners to explore male behaviour in this pressured present by evoking their social and familial histories, digging up secrets and unresolved issues, and bringing it to a powerful climax.

Leah Bonvissuto directs the consistently good cast: Cole Wimpee (Jet), Brendan Flood (Muskie), Isaac Byrne (Hiccup), Adam Laten Willson (Leander) and Michael Mason (K-Bus). The men’s feeling of brotherhood, amplified by the dangerous nature of their work and their small-town bonds, has come adrift and they have to fight as much with each other as they do for their lives. 

The slow-burn psychological thriller they treat us to covers a lot of ground: the economic exploitation of workers, the relationship between people and the earth and environment, and overlapping layers of myth and history. A Gothic underground chamber piece, it plays with the rhythms of midnight ghost stories and urban legends.

The show’s design privileges cascading dialogue and the thumping, whooshing sounds of the depths of the mine to deliver a stylistic, expressionistic experience. The action ducks around in time, from the present catastrophe to its inception, and elsewhere into memory. Well structured, it pulls us in and out of the action, as if we are nodding in and out of sleep.

Much of the action appeals on dual levels. For example there is a game where the challenge is to count down from twenty, making each name rhyme with the title of a country song. Even as we seek the answers ourselves, we empathise with those who face dire consequences if they get one wrong.

Recording theatre is a treacherous business, as film and theatre use different languages to achieve similar effects. It’s almost impossible to convert the audience’s experience of theatre to film by recording it ‘straight’. This tends to be exacerbated by the fact that stage tech (such as lighting and sound) tends not to translate well to film. But this show’s stygian setting and self-imposed technological limitations (i.e. the use of headlamps as the only source of lighting) really work for it.

The company has made some excellent choices, augmenting the show’s mounting dread by filming each scene (for the most part) in a long single take, using handheld cameras that move and loops throughout the space. This emphasises the characters’ subjective experience and the result is wonderfully disorienting and claustrophobic. Frequent use of extreme close ups on harshly partially-lit faces, and shifting perspectives, mean we’re also able to experience the narrative and the characters’ increasingly paranoid internal states in a way that a traditional theatre audience couldn’t.

The black of the screen potentially has a different sense of depth, too, than the black of a theatre. This, and the sonic ambience, are broken up a little by the necessary isolation inserts from the performers in isolation, but that’s not worth nit-picking. The company have done a great job with what they had. It’s a successful experiment.

That much of it is presented in a dark, empty theatre offers so many layers of metaphor! As for the title, there sure is a lot of hollering down there in the mine. There is a huge deer knife that coke gets snorted from. And Butcher Hollow turns out to be the location of the idyllic little farm house Jet dreams of settling down in – a universal fantasy.

Tune in here.

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