Digging Out a History : * Joe Lucas’ solo show ‘Once a Man, Twice a Boy’ draws on family memories for an intimate telling of miners’ struggles.

The simple, civilized handkerchief doesn’t belong in the world of writer-actor Joe Lucas’ solo performance work, “Once a Man, Twice a Boy.” Simple civility had no place in the dank, dreary and bloodstained Pennsylvania coal mine communities where generations of Lucas’ family were born and grew up and married and labored and died.

Yet it was a handkerchief that started the play on its course to tonight’s opening at Theatre West. Lucas was studying 10 years ago with legendary acting teacher Nina Foch, who ran her students through an exercise requiring them to speak their feelings about a chosen object. Lucas happened to choose his grandfather’s handkerchief.

“As I held it, looked at it,” Lucas says, sitting on the edge of the Theatre West stage, “it brought back a specter of the mines, my grandfather’s slow, painful death--the way miners usually died, from black lung disease--and the lives people led in that memorable, terrible place. Nina was moved to tears, and, believe me, she’s a very tough lady.”

Seven years passed, though, until Lucas, in his early 30s, wrote his memories down for a Theatre West workshop. Only later did Lucas realize that he was writing a solo play that opened a long-shuttered door on an ugly, brutish chapter of American history.

While “Once a Man, Twice a Boy” intertwines Lucas’ account of himself and his father with an intimate telling of miners’ lives, work and struggles, its dramatic centerpiece is the 1875 miners’ strike, led by the Working Mans’ Benevolent Assn. The organization, co-founded by Lucas’ great-great grandfather, Thomas O’Neill, was the incipient union that later became the United Mine Workers.

O’Neill’s men posed the first real challenge to the mining companies’ iron grip on workers and families, triggering the companies to hire Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. “The Pinkertons,” as they were known, Lucas says, concocted an imaginary cabal, supposedly led by O’Neill and others called the Molly Maguires. O’Neill and 19 others were tried, convicted and hanged for the murder of mining officials.

“It was one of the largest mass executions in U.S. legal history,” says Lucas. “The Pinkertons mistook old rituals the miners knew from the Irish fraternal group, the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, like handshakes and so on, and falsely attached them to a group conspiracy. It brought back all the old dislikes of the Irish--the whole region was rife with ethnic conflicts--and destroyed the strike’s coalition.”

Pennsylvanian historian Joe Wayne informed Lucas that he is the first descendant of the hanged strikers to tell this history, which Lucas says has been distorted in such previous tellings as Martin Ritt’s 1970 film “The Molly Maguires.”

The final work, resulting from many months’ collaboration between Lucas and director Mark Travis, is “the expression of guilt and pain. Guilt, which is mine, because I describe how I left my family and hometown of Pottsville (Pa.) behind for UCLA, an education and a better life--all while they suffered back home.”

The pain is even more complex. Until the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration made it illegal, mining companies kept workers in permanent debt under a system in which the companies owned goods, services and property and issued a weekly “bobtail check” to each worker that tallied the money owed the company after expenses were deducted from wages. The result: Miners’ children were born into debt. “If you tried to leave town,” Lucas says, “company guards could shoot you on sight because you were considered a thief, running out on what you owed.”

“When Joe told me this story,” says Travis, “he was amazingly matter-of-fact about it, as if this were typical practice in any American town. He had so internalized it, because it had been such a fixed reality of those peoples’ lives, that he didn’t view it as something extraordinary. I mean, is there anything else like it in American history?”

At the same time, Travis says he has drawn out of Lucas other kinds of “assumptions, amazing details that needed explaining but that fill out the story.” Unlike his usual practice, which is to develop an autobiographical script with a performer, Travis began working with Lucas after a few rewrites.

“The first time I heard it,” Travis says, “it was a history lecture, but Joe the person was lost in it. I encouraged him to bring himself out more, which nicely worked with my core interest in the performer’s personal journey and making that live on stage.

“But this piece contains something I’ve never seen before, which is Joe’s blending of his father, his growing up and the history of the mining region, turning history into a personal story.”

It may have begun with a handkerchief, but it ends with the title, a miners’ adage with a typically grim meaning. “As a boy miner,” Lucas says, “you’d be assigned to pick out or ‘size’ coal. Then, as a man, you’d be sent down into the mine shafts. After they’d worn you out in the mines, you’d be sent back up to ‘size’ coal again, an old man working with the boys. So ‘once a man, twice a boy.’ ”

Lucas says it with a slight shudder, knowing how close he came to never leaving that life for UCLA and an acting career that includes everything from a four-year stint playing a gang member on “Days of Our Lives,” to Brian Friel’s drama, “Freedom of the City.”

“I know people my own age who’ve never left,” he says without a hint of judgment. “Maybe, as bad as that place still is, they feel that the outside world is even worse.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Once a Man, Twice a Boy.”

Location: Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Universal City.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends June 12.

Price: $15.

Call: (213) 851-7977.