Steel Hammer Nails Myth Into Art

Truth: John Henry was a steel-driving man. He was a cotton-picking man. He was jailed for no good reason. He worked every single day he had on this earth. He was 22 when he died. He was 35 when he died. He was 50 when he died, and weighed 220 pounds. 225 pounds. Over 300 pounds. His wife was Polly Ann. Mary Ann. Julie Ann. Sary Ann. Sally Ann. 

There were many versions of him, one more powerful than the next, and all of them have some degree of truth.

That’s the basic thesis of Steel Hammer, a collaborative unpacking of the John Henry myth currently at Long Wharf Theatre. Coming to New Haven from the minds of Julia Wolfe, Siti Company, Bang On A Can All-Stars, and director Anne Bogart, the play promises from its outset to tell the story — the full story — of America’s famed and tragic steel driver in new and inventive ways.

And it gets there .… sometimes. 

The play, which opened Thursday night, runs through Sunday as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. 

Steel Hammer is most interested in exploring how a real, human life can take on epic proportions — sometimes to the detriment of that life’s owner. This is where the work’s real strengths lie. In a meshing of Appalachian folk music and Bang on A Can’s singular David Lang (The Great Beauty, Youth), whole narrative worlds are woven around the cast, and around John Henry (a virtuosic Eric Berryman) as company members try to make sense of a man and his legacy through song, spoken word, and lyrical movement.

Foregrounded is a loose fact: John Henry was a real man, whose life was lived, forgotten too quickly, and then appropriated and re-appropriated for different ends to different means. To tell his story is to give voice to men who were slaves first to reconstruction and Jim Crow, then to the Industrial Revolution, then to the prison industrial complex. To give stories to labor in America, the human cost of which is irreparable and unknown.

It’s this kind of presentation of a folktale and its afterlives, dramatized beautifully in lighting by Brian H. Scott and scenic design by Andrew Cotton and Christian Frederickson, that makes parts of the work feel entirely new and lends to them a sense of urgency. John Henry, we learn, was so much more than a steel-driving man: he was a lover, a father, a convict with no real crime to his name. He was smaller in size and bigger in heart than myth or memory would have anyone believe. To histories of race, class, and labor, he also also has one of love — to his wife Polly Ann, for whom he falls again and again as humans are drawn to history. 

This love story — and depiction of Polly Ann as agent myth-maker instead of dutiful and subservient spouse — leads to the strongest and most celebratory parts of the show. As Henry, Berryman is tenacious and knows no physical bounds; actress Patrice Johnson Chevannes rises to equal him at every opportunity. It’s the way they truth-tell and wind around each other, bolstered by a strong cast, that breaks the audience down as they watch John Henry die onstage, over and over again, and it never gets easier or less heartbreaking. 

But Steel Hammer’s ambition and willingness to take risks can also feel clumsy. The show’s concept — its extraordinary blurring of myth and fact, this challenge to history and its many revisionists — ultimately outweighs its execution. Stunning, layered vocals (Emily Eagen, Katie Geissinger, and Molly Quinn) are marred by a spoken script that reads, more often than not, like an exhausting slam poem and spoon-feeds an audience smart enough to get the play without it. This seeps into every gorgeous aspect of the play; exhilarating choreography is slightly soured, inventive music is overwhelmed by over-explanation.

For the experiment in which it revels, and moments it breaks the fourth wall, however, it’s well worth the trip to Long Wharf. As a conflicted love story to Henry, to myth, and to the flimsiness of history, Steel Hammer is more lusty than anything else. But sometimes, lust is enough.

Steel Hammer runs at the Long Wharf Theatre Friday, June 17 and Saturday, June 18. Click here for more details.