Paved With Gold and Ashes is a short piece, but it packs more into its run than you might imagine. Coming in at just under an hour, it beautifully delivers the humanity of the five women at the heart of the story and the tragedy that befalls them.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster was the deadliest industrial accident in New York’s history. 143 people were killed in the blaze, the vast majority of them women and girls. This play tells the stories – and shares the hopes and dreams of 4 women who died and one who lived.
This is a story about what happens when it turns out that for many – particularly immigrants – the American dream can quickly become a nightmare. In Thurson’s moving and human script, deftly aided by Smith’s tight direction, we see each girl’s personality, her dreams, her secrets and ambitions. Even in such a short time, they are fully realised. Before there is tragedy, there is hope. That is what makes the tragedy so powerful when it comes.
All these girls are immigrants, but each has a different experience. What is unsaid but very clear is the delineation, those tiny tiny class differences that exist as those with very little sort themselves into hierarchies. This is a story about workers rights, but it is also a story about class and its random allocation which has life altering effects. Find yourself slightly higher on the pecking order and you might work one floor higher up from where the fire starts. One floor that means you will be able to leave – able to live.
Paved With Gold and Ashes is gripping from the off, with a fully rounded understanding that these women’s lives were really hard before they ended in disaster. It is worth remembering this and Thurston does so. The women are constantly working at the materials in their hands, never able to stop even as they take up their own narratives.
The stage is quite bare except for these materials and five chairs – four rickety kitchen chairs and one that almost resembles a throne – another nod to the elevated status of the overseer. But these materials and chairs become a scene in Italy, a Hollywood encounter, a romantic bedroom and more.
The movement is swift without being frenetic. It is backed by an ongoing never ending machinery hum that gives the audience a sense of what it must feel like in the factory (though not, I suspect, the volume that would deliver). The actors periodically sing – old songs from their character’s old countries. This provides moments of breathtaking beauty and charm. All the more then to wallop you as the darkness and smoke overwhelms the factory and the girls in it.
This is a beautiful piece of storytelling and art about a tragedy and the people who were lost. But it is also about so much more. In this time where we are all too good at demonising each other and denying the good in humanity we could all do with a reminder as powerful as this.