‘Mill Fire’ Cools at West Coast

High above the city of Birmingham, Ala., rises the statue of Vulcan, god of the forge. The statue is now a sadly ironic metaphor for this Southern manufacturing center, whose forges quickly cooled in the steel bust of the late 1970s.

Set in Birmingham in the late 1970s, Sally Nemeth’s “Mill Fire” at West Coast Ensemble fails to evoke this rich setting or this turbulent time, drifting instead in the void of director Avner Garbi’s technically scrupulous but thematically unspecific staging, which fails to pin down the period, the place or indeed the pulse of the play.

What results is more dirge than elegy. Nemeth’s drama deals with the tragic aftermath of a steel mill explosion, particularly as it affects a young woman widowed in the disaster. The feisty young widow Marlene (Carol Adele Davis) rejects the mill owners’ attempted cash settlement, denouncing their offer as blood money, a beau geste that alienates the three older women widowed in the incident.

These three widows function as a kind of Greek chorus throughout, stalking through the set in widows’ weeds and commenting on the proceedings in what seems a near-trance. Indeed, with the spirited exceptions of Eamon Hunt, who plays Marlene’s mill supervisor brother, and Carol Stanzione as his drunken missus, the tone remains unremittingly funereal--effectively so during Marlene’s genuinely cathartic outburst at the play’s end. However, even the self-consciously sensual cavortings of Marlene and her hunky husband Champ (Josh Carmichael), prior to the accident, can’t thaw the ice around the corpse at this wake.

* “Mill Fire,” West Coast Ensemble, 6240 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Nov. 20. $15. (213) 871-1052. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.