Under the orange flame of the steelyard, one woman found something unexpected: Peace and courage.
The new play, "Rust: A Story of Steel and Grit,” explores how it happened. The adaptation of Eliese Colette Goldbach’s memoir opens Friday night at Dobama Theatre in Cleveland Heights.
“There's a little bit of a Romeo and Juliet romance going on: She lives on the West Side and her boyfriend's on the East Side,” said playwright George Brant. “It feels very Cleveland, but also very Midwest. We are not the only steel town.”
Brant adapted Goldbach’s work, which follows her mental health challenges and the career struggles that led her to work in her hometown’s steel industry in 2016. By 2020, she was promoting her memoir on NPR – which caught the attention of Dobama’s creative staff.
“This is definitely a story that is forged in Cleveland,” said director Laura Kepley. “Here is a young woman who got her liberal arts degree and thought, ‘I want to be a professor. I want to be a teacher.’ And she just couldn't find a job.”
Working in the steel mill was something the main character never envisioned.
“She enters as a petite woman; as a liberal-leaning woman,” Kepley said. “This is a place that the world says, ‘You don't belong here and this is a dangerous world for you.’”
The book was first adapted as a one-woman show, but, after workshopping the piece, it became a play so the narrative didn’t just fall on the main character.
“We have Eliese telling her story, and she stays herself,” Kepley said. “We have three actors who step into probably 30 different characters to really fill out the world. It allows us to vivify, to manifest some of these conflicts, especially as she's encountering some people in the mill with a different world view.”
Kelly Strand plays Eliese, described by Kepley as a down-to-Earth, humble, funny person. She encounters a place full of diverse people and ideas.
“We get to really have them debate,” Kepley said. “The wonderful thing is, they're not just debating. They are actually finding connections. And that is one of the most hopeful things in the play and, I think, one of the most necessary things for our world right now.”
Kepley and Brant estimate they’ve worked together on a dozen productions. She previously spent 12 years as artistic director of Cleveland Play House, stepping down in 2022.
“One of the things that I realized was that I really longed to be a full-time director again,” she said. “I was so happy to lead the Play House, but I was spending more and more time outside of the rehearsal hall. I'm just so thrilled to be able to be focusing all my energy on making work that hopefully elevates, empowers and connects people.”
