A Ham for This Season

While it isn't time for the presidential election just yet, 'tis unquestionably the season for politics, propaganda, and the polemical. And while the government spends taxpayer money to glorify the candidates and maintain the status quo (when it could take a small portion of that 50% of every taxpayer dollar spent on "defense" and irradiating countries in the Middle East and instead provide health care for every uninsured child in the U.S., better schools, and better public transportation to ease the current energy crisis) and each of us contemplates which side of the Democrat/ Republican coin to choose for the next four-year round of more-of-the-same, why not sample a little Ham, brought to you by Hyde Park Theatre, director/actor Ken Webster, and playwright/actor Hans Frank, the same gents who, over the past three years, have brought you Lonely Highway, Spy From Mars, Post-Neanderthal Diet, and The Armageddon Telethon.

"I've been working on the play for seven years," says Frank, "and now it's done. I was born and raised in southeastern Ohio, which is really part of the south, of Appalachia. Ham is a county commissioner at odds with the coal companies. While the Office of the Inspector General writes environmental policy, the EPA has the option to disregard any or all of it, which is what they've done pretty much 100% of the time since the Nixon administration. So the coal companies can go in, work with the EPA, abuse Appalachia, especially the upper middle Appalachians, and use them as a toilet. Ham is trying to put a stop to it, trying to push through a bill in the state legislature so that the coal companies would have to post a bond to be used for cleanup and reclamation, so that they can't just go in, mine, pollute, declare bankruptcy, then move across the county line and start all over again. One of the last bills Clinton signed was a bill just like this, but Bush got rid of it."

"I've been interested in the play for quite a while," says Webster, "and it turns out to be quite topical. A federal judge just ruled that 3,000 miners are not entitled to benefits or pension plans because a coal mining company went 'bankrupt.' And the Bush administration has put someone in charge of the coal-mining industry who used to be involved with the coal-mining companies.

"It's a political thriller, in a sense, but what really appealed to me was this great antihero, Ham. I love these kind of complicated, driven people, people who try to do good for their communities but who, in the process, end up doing horrible, despicable things."

Sounds like most politicians. Except, of course, the doing "good for their communities" part.