Two Trains Running

Caught a great August Wilson play last night as part of the August Wilson retrospective at the Kennedy Center. I convinced my friend Brett to blog about it for me because I'm too lazy.

Last night Julia and I went to see a reading of August Wilson’s “Two Train’s Running” at the Kennedy Center (which, I was excited to learn, featured Glynn Turman, who played “Mayor Clarence Royce” on “The Wire”). If I had any apprehensions about the fact that it was a reading–where the actors read from a script instead of from memory–those concerns were quickly assuaged by the high-quality of the set, the scoring, and even the sometimes inventive ways that the actors concealed their scripts. Set in a local Pittsburgh grill, the actors turned their scripts into menus and trays of short-ribs, while the songs of Marvin Gaye set the mood for this impassioned exploration of post-Civil Rights black life.

Amid the compelling lives, deaths, romances, and travails that are the staples of good drama, “Two Trains Running” also offers a spirited discussion of the assassination of Martin Luther King (who was killed, according to one character, “because he was a Saint”) and some unexpected criticisms of the Black Power movement. These forays into the familiar conflicts of the era still manage to be insightful, and, along with a gentrification sub-plot and a survey of local cultural institutions, cohere into a wholly vibrant period piece.+/-

The entire play is superbly acted, most notably by Hassan El-Amin. What I found most interesting, though, was the strong undercurrent of a demand for reparations that ran throughout Wilson’s play. “Hambone,” the indigent, developmentally challenged character who seems to exemplify the futility of black protest, stands outside the white grocery store everyday, chanting, “I want my ham!” He ultimately gets his ham, but not until after he has any use for it. Echoing the tragic unfulfilled promise of “forty acres and a mule,” “Memphis” recounts how, back in Mississippi, he watched the gruesome killing and mutilation of his mule by whites eager to steal the land that he had made profitable. These metaphors, like the literal scars that cover the bodies of two of the play’s central figures, add the kind of symbolic depth that typify why Wilson’s vivid depictions of black life are among the most celebrated works of the twentieth century.

“Two Trains Running” is a fantastic play, and the cast and crew manage to do it justice even as a reading; it is the kind of powerful drama to which “The Wire” is undoubtably indebted.