Local playwright bringing 1947 Medalta strike to the stage
“The workers at Medalta Potteries went on strike for 72 days, and it raised a lot of concern and controversy in the community.”
– Jay Johnson, author of Medalta on Strike
A local playwright held the first-ever reading Saturday afternoon of a play he wrote on the 1947 strike at Medalta, and he hopes it will soon be taken to the stage in the city.
Former English and drama professor at Medicine Hat College, Jay Johnson, started writing Medalta on Strike after retiring, and Saturday he got to see it come to life for the first time.
“While this is meant to be acted out, this is a good first step,” said Johnson. “We’ve had six people working on the script for the last week or so, now we’re reading it out to an audience for the first time. We’ve just invited a few people that we thought might be interested, and would be able to give good feedback at the end of it.”
With Lisa Marie DiLiberto and the A Tale of a Town crew in town for their Nov. 3 show, Johnson says a group of six has been perfecting the script for the last week.
“The group has really been helping me with the script,” he said. “Lisa Marie from A Tale of a Town and a couple others have really helped me progress the script, and they’ve helped me make it a little more dynamic and a little more dramatically effective. We’ve evolved the script through a few stages, and today we’re presenting it to an invited audience, to get some people to listen to this and give us feedback.”
Johnson says the play is about a very important time in Medicine Hat’s history. “The title really tells it all,” he said. “Medalta on Strike, is about, well, exactly that. The play focuses on a very important and interesting episode from the life of Medicine Hat. The strike happened in 1947, during the post-war era. The workers at Medalta Potteries went on strike for 72 days, and it raised a lot of concern and controversy in the community, and it ended with a number of the workers being sentenced to hard labour at Lethbridge jail. I’ve tried to detail the facts as best I could.”
The play stays true to the events historically, but Johnson says the group did add a couple things to make it a little more entertaining.
“We’ve taken a few dramatic liberties, to make it a little more entertaining and understandable. To the greatest degree possible, we have tried to stick to the facts, and to tell the story as accurately as possible,” he said. “One of the invented characters is a young soldier from Medicine Hat. This soldier served overseas and came back to a job at Medalta. He becomes involved in the union and the strike, and the story is told through his eyes. We’ve created him to tell this story.”
The professor of 35 years says he has done extensive research on the Medalta strike and the time period.
“I read through articles from the Medicine Hat News from the entire period, I read all I could from books about the period, and I worked up a treatment that might be effective. After showing some people the script, we decided to do the showing today for a select audience.”
Johnson says he hopes to see the play come to life in 2018.