Photo by June Xie
Gaetano Marangelli
Gaetano Marangelli
Iron County has a slightly forbidding ring, suggesting something dark and ominous, like a January snowstorm or a story by August Derleth. It’s a real place in northern Wisconsin, the forested setting of Gaetano Marangelli’s play Iron County, debuting at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre this month.
The five-man play has been compared to David Mamet for its taut, repetitive, chiseled language. The drama unfolds in 1975 at a liminal moment in American history, in between Nixon and Carter, as the counterculture fades and the Me Decade had only just begun. Iron County concerns two brothers, Sam and Ted, onetime hippies having trouble realizing their dream of living off the land; Noah, a taciturn Native American who is living off the land; Bob, the bartender at a rural roadside tavern; and Bob, a motorist passing through.
The motorist is the catalyst after hitting a deer crossing the road and coming to the bar, asking for help. The mishaps and mayhem that ensure start to sound like the Coen brothers’ Fargo, but Iron County isn’t a dark comedy. “I’d call it a drama that asks who owns the land we call America. It explores how the land became divided,” Marangelli says.
Iron County might have more metaphors than characters, at least as Marangelli describes the contending historical forces at work—Manifest Destiny, the Frontier Theory of American History, American Exceptionalism, America as the Melting Pot ... However, the characters aren’t merely ideas embodied but are fully drawn, containing multitudes of contradictions. Their worldviews are a mosaic of attitudes formed from the elements in their environment.
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Ultimately, Iron County asks the question: Are we in this together or is it us against nature, us against them?
The granular complexity of human characters is one thing that separates art from propaganda. “It’s a problem sometimes in contemporary theater, which reads like a ‘lesser form of journalism’ expressed through didactic characters,” Marangelli says. “A play is not an op-ed piece. It should be richer than that.”
Iron County began as a short play and was given a full-length reading by the Drama League of New York in 2018. “The story at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre began four years ago,” Marangelli says. “I sent the first draft to Marcy Kerns, the associate artistic director. She responded immediately.” Iron County was scheduled for March 2020—but the pandemic intervened.
Iron County finally receives its production in a staged reading, 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 18 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre. Iron County will be directed by Lisa Kornetsky and will feature Marcus Truschinski, Josh Krause, Chris Klopatik and Shayne Steliga with stage directions by Jarrod Langwinski. Admission is free.
A second staged reading, by Brigata Theater, has been scheduled at UW-Parkside’s The Rita Studio A (900 Wood Road, Kenosha) at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 11. It will be directed by Lisa Kornetsky with a cast to be announced. For more information, visit Brigata Theater at facebook.com/BrigataTheater.
