Coal Valley: The Making of a Miner

Koller, Katherine Ann, Born: June 22, 1957 (Playwright)

Born: June 22, 1957

Playwright

In The Alberta Advantage, edited by Anne Nothof

Playwrights Canada Press

2008
2008

ISBN: 978-0887547836

monographic

text

First produced in 2005 at Royal Tyrrell Museum Theatre in Drumheller, Alberta. Geographic setting: Central Alberta. Historical period: Early 20th Century. Characters: male adults: 4; female adults: 2. Play includes speeches suitable for actors auditioning.

Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory

Comedy

islandora:0447998d-36da-44f9-bcfc-4d2a231e40f7

2018-07-14T19:08:23.929Z

This is the story of Chip, a boy who lost his father in the 1914 Hillcrest mining disaster, but who wants more than anything to be an underground coal miner. Against his mother’s wishes, he gets hired on at the new mines in their new home in the Red Deer River Valley. He makes friends with Slav, an immigrant miner who only wants a wife, and together they brave the courses of history between the world wars, fighting racism, strikes, unsafe conditions and unfair owners, but finding a life that allows each them to be “his own man.” Their wives, however, have differing views on that! When it is time for Chip to close the last mine, he finds what he has been searching for all along in the deep: the spirit of his father, the lost miner, who has been coaching and protecting him from the beginning.