HOUSE LIGHTS DOWN, stage lights up: "The moon hangs itself high this night. High over the desert filth and mucky red water that rests heavy on the place and souls I come to love. Tis a place that has since been all but forgotten. But those of us who lived there, the whole lot of us fools and dreamers, we'll ne'er be having the blessing of forgettin'. ... "On the northern part of the slope, Just a skip up the Colorado River from the site of Boulder Dam, sat a ragged shantytown. ... Nevada, the desert, the dam, home. Of course we ne'er called it home. We be calling it hell, the devil's dubby, the hottest goddamn place on Earth, but ne'er home. They say that if ye be listening closely, if ye let the wind pass by yer ear for long enough, ye can hear them, the voices of ghosts, ghosts of the workers, ghosts of their families and friends, ghosts of their loved ones, ghosts of dreams ne'er come to be. These be the ghosts of Ragtown."
Buried in a watery tomb beneath the ripples of Lake Mead, silenced by Boulder City's modernity but voiced by its history, is a memory called Ragtown. A stinkhole of shacks, tents, tin roofs and cardboard shelter rife with death, disease, despair and desperate immigrants—flocking to jobs on the Engineering Marvel of the World, a project of unheard-of scope and scale that, in the instant flashback that art provides, is about to be fractured by unionizers and strike-breakers.
This is a Nevada story, the sort that materializes on Google searches, fleetingly supplements TV documentaries and peppers the museum walls of the accomplished marvel itself before you're ushered into the gift shop, but rarely graces a Las Vegas stage.
"I was watching a PBS special about the building of the Hoover Dam and they had this very brief glimpse of Ragtown, maybe 30 seconds," says Jayme McGhan, a 24-year-old Minnesotan and UNLV MFA candidate in playwriting who authored Ragtown.
"It said this was where roughly a thousand workers waited for work on the dam and many died. I thought, Wow, that would be a really interesting play. Then I forgot about it. But then I came here to UNLV to get my master's, and remembered the idea."
(McGhan's play, running April 6-9 at UNLV's Black Box Theatre, comprises part of the university's Playwrights' Festival of original students' works, also including Stan Waring's Pluck the Rose April 13-16, and Ross Howard's The Loggerheads of Lambhuna Drive, April 20-23.)
Ragtown, set in May 1931, is the tale of the Tierney family, Irish immigrants from Kilkenney, who have settled in the infamous shantytown seeking often life-threatening employment on the ambitious dam site. Family patriarch Ennis, a physician by trade, joins the Industrial Workers of the World or IWW, also known as "wobblies," to the disdain of his 18-year-old son, Brodan. When pay cuts by Six Companies, the outfit that won the bid to build the dam, trigger a strike, a federal marshal tempts Brodan—who's grown close to the young wife of the union's "go-to" guy—to find out the name of the union organizer and turn it over, by promising his family a decent home in Boulder City, and his dad a clinic of his own.
With father among the strikers trying to better life for his clan, and son tempted to help break the strike because he thinks he's been offered a better solution, will all the dam workers' fates fall victim to one family's increasingly unstable fissures?
"My family comes out of a blue-collar background, they're all union members," says McGhan, whose script for Ragtown won it a staged reading at New York's Irish Repertory Theatre in February, and serves as his master's thesis. "My mom worked for the airlines, my dad is in the electrician business, my grandfather is with the carpenters, they're all union. [The play] is kind of me growing up, watching them get mistreated, tossed around over and over again by the companies that supposedly respect and honor them. And more so now, the people who run the unions are in the pockets of the corporations.
"Unions mean very little now, so I figured it was time to write a play, for me, about the working man and what they struggle for and fight for. There's a nobility to them that we seem to have lost. The last [plays] about unions was really Clifford Odets in the '30s, nobody's really tackled this since, so it's really close to my heart."
The Boulder Dam (later renamed for President Herbert Hoover), which commenced construction on April 20, 1931 and was completed March 1, 1936 at a $165 million price tag, marked the first serious federal incursion into Southern Nevada and attracted thousands of impoverished laborers willing to endure miserable conditions—miniscule wages, horrendous heat, rock slides, tunnel explosions, constant danger of death dangling high atop the perilous miracle-in-the-making—so their families could muddle through.
Ragtown, the fetid and filthy squatters' settlement they turned into a makeshift community, was almost literally hell on the Black Canyon floor. With searing temperatures a challenge to fresh food, occupants stored some in covered holes in the ground or hung it in baskets from their tent poles, but hordes of black ants ravaged much of what wasn't spoiled by 120-degree days. Settlers drank and cooked with water drawn from the Colorado River that was often thick with silt, leading to rampant dysentery. Latrines were dug in ditches and smeared with lime to ward off odor and keep sickness from decimating the workforce.
There was, fortunately and unfortunately, no Ragtown for McGhan to research firsthand more than seven decades later, though the budding playwright did his historical homework and put it to use—selectively, for the sake of artistic expression.
"I did quite a bit of research," McGhan says. "My first year here, I had my winter break, and I went out to the dam pretty much every other day, going up to the sides of the cliffs and just listening. It takes your breath away when you really know about it, and then you hear about all these people who died working on it, or even just waiting to get work on it.
"I went to all the museums, and UNLV has a lot of history on the building of the Boulder Dam at the Lied Library. You know, the play is not historically accurate completely. It was taken out of historical accuracy somewhat for the purpose of drama, of poetic license. But a lot of it is accurate."
And McGhan's characters are loose extensions of himself and his family. "Brodan just came from my youthful righteousness, thinking he's doing good for one, and maybe not doing well for the other. The father figure is definitely based on my own dad. He, and my mother as well, always taught me, above all things, respect your fellow man, love your neighbor as you love yourself, treat everybody equally. The other characters are from people I've met along the way, like a friend of my grandfather's, an old Mafia guy who was active in the unions."
The strike that catapults Ragtown toward its core conflict barely lasted a week in actuality. Wobblies, protesting pay cuts and insisting that working conditions comply with state mining safety laws, found Six Companies implacable. Their demands were rejected, wobblies were confronted by company-hired thugs armed with guns and clubs, and an ultimatum to resume work or face dismissal finally split the strikers enough to wipe out the walkout.
And for Ragtown's author, it was more than enough to singe his social sensibilities, from which his artistic energy erupts.
"If God has given me one gift, it's my anger toward injustice," McGhan says. "I think theater is one of the most powerful tools for change, and we'd be selling ourselves short if we don't use it for that. That's not to say that every playwright has that in them or wants to do that, but I certainly do. George Bernard Shaw is a genius because he starts with an idea. Like in Major Barbara, the defense companies are ruling the world, making billions off of people's suffering, and he's saying there needs to be reform."
Ideas are where passions begin—and live on—even after events fade.
"It is a memory play in a certain way," McGhan says. "Brodan begins the play on the side of the cliff, looking down over Ragtown, and it's an invitation into that world. And in the end, it's a farewell to Ragtown, which is now covered by Lake Mead, so there's something ghostly about that."
As Brodan, through McGhan's words, observes in the closing monologue of Ragtown:
"They've built a monument to the dead, they have. Two towering figures with wings. Methinks they're supposed to be angels, but I didn't know any angels here. Only people, people come to find work, people come to find a dream. They've put the names of the dam's dead down, etched in history fer all to see. But the souls, the people of Ragtown, ye can't be tracing them names. They'll go unnoticed, unremembered, lost under the water."