Written by Lee Hall
Broadway's Samuel J. Freedman Theater
To adapt an old cliché, Britain and America can sometimes seem like two countries divided by a common theater. The Pitmen Painters is the sort of play that the British turn out regularly, but that has trouble getting arrested on these shores: a straightforward, almost artless docudrama, grounded in true-life events and contemporary issues, wearing its sociopolitical message on its sleeve. A critical smash at London's National Theatre, it's the story of a band of Northumberland coal miners in the 1930s who began meeting for an art class and were soon producing paintings that became the toast of the London art scene. Playwright Lee Hall (who wrote both the stage and screen versions of Billy Elliot) goes a bit overboard in romanticizing these rough-hewn Van Goghs, and the paint-by-numbers predictability makes the play a bit of a slog. Yet the crackerjack ensemble cast (transplanted intact from London, under Max Roberts' direction) couldn't be better, and Hall's populist argument — that art needs to be reclaimed from its élitist protectorate and returned to the common folk — is at least easier to take than the puffed-up portrait of artistic "genius" in last season's Tony-winning Red.