1892 STEEL STRIKE CHANGED HISTORY
Actor Mark Rylance revisits the Battle of Homestead
Mark Rylance is coming back to pursue a passion. The awardwinning actor, director and activist will help celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Homestead here with a performance — “Mark Rylance & Friends: Shakespeare & the Battle of Homestead” — on July 6, after an advance party for patrons on Friday.
His passion goes back at least 12 years, when he was working on a play tentatively called “Steel,” about Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and Homestead. There already had been a workshop production in London, and he’d toured the Mon Valley with Dave Demarest and industrial sites with Karla Boos. He would play Frick, the robber baron whose personal story spoke to him. Then success got in the way. Not that Mr. Rylance wasn’t already successful. Since 2005 he had been the founding artistic director and leading actor of London’s Globe Theatre, the re-created theater for which Shakespeare wrote 400 years before.
He first encountered Carnegie and Frick when he played Hamlet at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1991. When he returned here with his Globe company in 2003 and 2005, Frick became an obsession. In 2008, the stage was finally cleared: Carnegie Mellon University announced that the “master actor/director” would spend an “immersive month working with students in the School of Drama,” workshopping what was then called “The Divine Comedy of Carnegie,
Frick and Goldman Incor-porated.”
But before that, he had to finish a London revival ofthe 1960s farce “Boeing Boe-ing.” Unexpectedly, it took off, going to Broadway and winning Mr. Rylance his first Tony Award. His Pitts-burgh play would have towait. In quick succession, he starred in four more plays on Broadway, win-ning two more Tonys.
There were more major shows in London. Then came TV andthe movies, including an Os-car for Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies.” There were dark days, too. He was devastated bythe death of his daughter, just 10 years after learning how Frick was shaken bythe death of his own daugh-ter, which Mr. Rylance calls “curious synchronicity.” He had to withdraw fromhis part in the 2012 London Olympics. (Kenneth Branagh filled in.) Still, stage triumphs piled up, as did his charitable work forpeace and the rights of in-digenous peoples. His stat-ure is such that this year hewas knighted by the queen. Next month, his latest film, “Dunkirk,” opens. And this fall he’ll be back on Broad-way in “Farinelli and the King” written by his wife, Claire van Kampen.
But amid all that, he fi-nally has carved out severalmonths to return to Pitts-burgh and Carnegie and Frick.
“I’ve been distracted,” hesays dryly, by phone from England. “[But] that history still haunts me.”
He was first captivated by Frick when he visited hishome at Clayton. He was moved by his loss of his daughter and his wife, then was surprised to find others weren’t so sympathetic. He soon learned about Frick’s more unsavory, robber baron side. So his research began.
Now, he has a small office where he’s surrounded by books about Carnegie, Frick, the socialist Emma Goldman, Frick’s would-be-assassin Alexander Berk-man and “all those Hungar-ian workers in a town like Homestead.” He’s been back here from time to time for research, and he’s met oth-ers who celebrate the his-tory of the Mon Valley, like Charlie McCollester and other leaders of the Battle of Homestead Foundation.
Mr. Rylance points out that the larger story actu-ally started long ago, with the Delaware people who preceded Europeans here, and then rippled outward, as Pittsburgh grew, “so rap-idly and dramatically intoan industrial mecca.” He calls the story of European culture meeting all the rawmaterials “resonant for our times.”
“It exposes forces still working powerfully in theworld,” he said.
He acknowledges the cost of the industrial explosion of a century or more ago, quoting a priest who blessed the new Brooklyn Bridge (built with Carnegie steel), praising it as the expression of man suppressing the forces of nature. In re-- sponse, Mr. Rylance’s interest is in the interplay of history and the personality of the industrial giants, in what “suppression of their own human nature was necessary to suppress that of those around them.”
To share some of his thoughts and support the Battle of Homestead Foundation, he will offer a July 6 program at the Carnegie Library of Homestead in Munhall, “Mark Rylance & Friends: Shakespeare & The Battle of Homestead.” He’ll perform favorite speeches from Shakespeare and join with local musicians and actors ( he mentioned David Conrad and Wali Jamal) to revisit the years leading up to 1892.
As a prelude, this Friday, the foundation is sponsoring a “Meet. Greet. Commemorate” event, with Mr. Rylance as guest of honor, at the Bost Building ( the 1892 workers’ union headquarters) in Munhall.
Included on July 6 will be some sections of the play that first brought him to Pittsburgh, “Hamlet.” The connection, he says, is that the “resonance for this occasion is how the younger generation deals with history,” as Hamlet, Laertes and Ophelia ( for example) deal with the past in Shakespeare’s play.
As to the Battle of Homestead, he sees it and the issues it raises as, “the foundation of the society we live in.” He quotes Hillary Mantel ( author of “Wolf Hall”) saying the “study of history is a revolutionary act ... [ because] if things were dif- ferent in the past, they can be better in the future.”
In the days of Carnegie and Frick, Mr. Rylance points out, there was child labor and widespread injury and death of workers; there was no income tax and no laws against insider trading. For Carnegie, “business was a kind of competitive game.” Betraying his American roots ( he grew up in the U. S., ages 2 to 18), Mr. Rylance draws an analogy to baseball, where “as players get round the conditions, the game has had to learn to rebalance.”
His and co- author Peter Reder’s play, now tentatively called “Steel and Philanthropy,” is still evolving. It explores big themes, with an epic historical scope. He laughs. “It was five plays a month ago,” he says, “but now it’s four” — on its way, presumably, to being one. He envisions the result as having four main movements: Carnegie, Frick, The Amalgamated Union of Iron and Steel Workers, and Goldman and Berkman ( lovers and colleagues).
“I came to Pittsburgh in 2003 looking for a new play worthy of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater,” he says. Instead, “I discovered a story worthy of this globe we hope to continue living on. It has obsessed me ever since.”