By Gail McCarthy Staff Writer Gloucester Daily Times
The 1986 setting for the play “North Shore Fish” — now showing at Gloucester Stage resuming Wednesday night — hints at a foreboding crisis in the fishing industry that started as a trickle in the mid-1980s, and has become a veritable deluge in 2013.
But while the dwindling fish landings feeding into the background story for the Israel Horovitz play continue into the 21st century, it is under dramatically different circumstances.
Local fishermen today are fighting to maintain their livelihood against the pressures of a federal bureaucracy they believe wants to shut them down, but the workers who manned the plentiful fish processing plants in the 1980s and in Horovitz’s play faced a vanishing way of life due to automation, foreign competition and eventually, yes, a dwindling number of landings.
In the mid-1980s, millions of pounds of fish were landed daily by the Gloucester-based fleet — compared to the landings at the Cape Ann Seafood Exchange on Harbor Loop last Thursday, which was 7,700 pounds.
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