`WALKING ON OUR KNEES'

This weekend, Sharon Bebout's parents will see for the first time the play she has written about their lives as a coal-mining family.

"I'm a little apprehensive," she confesses.

It's not that "Walking On Our Knees" bleakly portrays the miner's lot; in fact, in the miners' own plain-spoken words and their families', the play evinces the dignity in their lives.

Part of Bebout's apprehension lies in the likelihood of having coal miners in the audience. "I'm afraid somebody will stand up and say, `That's not how it was down there,'" she said, only half-kidding.

The other part may lie in the sometimes unhappy and tragic family history she had to examine to write the play.

The University Theatre's "Walking On Our Knees" opens at 8 p.m. Friday at the Forrest H. Rose Theatre. It will be presented again Saturday, and Feb. 24-27.

Termed a "performance ethnography," the two-act play simply allows the miners and members of their families to talk about their lives in monologues and dialogues. The characters are based on real people in some cases they are composites she interviewed during her research.

The hardness of the life has cost most of them someone or something of themselves. Still, the stories they recount the mine rats seem to grow with each telling reveal true affection for what they do and for each other.

But when Sara, the narrator, talks about how ashamed she was as a child that her father came home from work every day filthy with coal dust, she speaks for Bebout's own feelings of separation from other children because of her father's job.

And then there's Sara looking at pictures of her brother John and talking about how he died in a mine accident.

Bebout, an assistant professor of speech communication and theater at Southeast Missouri State University, grew up a coal miner's daughter in Morganfield, a town in Western Kentucky. She loathed the life.

Death's shadow was constant. The first boy she dated was killed in a rock slide.

"A lot of things are intolerable," Bebout says. "There is constant worry, especially when the telephone rings at night."

"... When I got old enough, I ran away as fast as I could."

She married a farmer to escape the mines, but the mines don't release their grip easily. She was 23 when her younger brother John was killed in the coal mine.

Later, her life headed in a new direction, she decided to examine this life she so desperately wanted to abandon.

The play, written in 1989, was produced in another form for her dissertation at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Her one-woman show incorporating its elements also previously was presented at the university.

The first production was a series of vignettes. Bebout constructed it after a year of interviewing coal miners and their families in Western Kentucky, Southern Illinois and Southern Indiana.

The narrator has been added for this production. She speaks Bebout's own thoughts about the coal mining life.

In talking about her father, she recalls that he dragged himself home from work at 7 a.m. not to fall into bed but to play with his children. He read Tolstoy, Kipling and Shakespeare to her.

And she remembers how easily the members of her family expressed their love to each other. "You don't know if you're gonna see them tomorrow," Sara says.

That was a gift of openness Bebout has retained.

The play's title refers to the posture that must be adopted just to enter many mines. "You're literally walking on your knees," Bebout says.

Though there are women coal miners, it's still a macho world, Bebout says, where the women who mine are resented not only by the men but by the male miners' wives.

Most of the actors and some of the actresses in the production wear flannel shirts and dungarees. Their monologues or dialogues take place on the barest of black sets sometimes dressed by a worn sofa.

The play also employs screens where slides demonstrate the mechanical dangers hidden to those of us who remain above ground.

The cast includes Shauna Thieman, Amy Monfort, Sabrina Robinson, Anna Ruggiero, Jennifer Cooper, Troy Young, Jay Cross, Scott Hamann and Allen Field.

The hardest part has been teaching actors the dialect, she said. It doesn't come naturally to most college students to say, "A-draggin' that thing and a-beatin' it."

Always on stage are Brian and Jeanette Driscoll, who sing haunting traditional songs about the hardness and heartbreak of mining. Brian, who accompanies himself and his wife on guitar, also wrote one of the tunes, "One Day's Pay."

It's title refers to the amount of money each miner customarily gives the family of a co-worker who has been killed.

Though the mining companies claim the industry is much safer now than in the past, Bebout says death remains an ever-present member of miners' families' lives.

"Two weeks after the show closed (at SIU), there was a min~ing explosion that killed 10 men," she said.

Tickets for "Walking On Our Knees" are $5 for non-students, $3 for students, faculty and seniors.