Two Trains Running

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Sophina Brown
Through March 3 

RECOMMENDED 

There’s a false narrative out there that Art is an elitist enterprise. It isn’t. When Art is good, it becomes part of your personal highlight reel, one of those experiences that you keep going back to and savoring. When Art is great, it feels like a miracle. The beauty and heartbreak of life is revealed as in a vision. Suddenly it’s clear what all the daily struggles are about, and that in fact we do share a common humanity, no matter how alienated from each other we often feel.

Two Trains Running by August Wilson is far from a perfect play. It is too long and too talky. The story construction — always a sore point for Wilson, who was first and foremost a poet — is shaky. Several events are set up, then don’t come to pass. The resolution depends on offstage events whose outcome seems arbitrary, perhaps even unjustified. Two Trains Running is not even one of Wilson’s best plays — in my opinion Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Fences and Gem of the Ocean are better. But after seeing Michele Shay’s production of Two Trains Running at the Matrix, I have no doubt that this is a great drama which is receiving as loving a presentation as I can imagine, one that is achingly human and alive.

Two Trains Running takes place in 1969, at the end of a turbulent decade that has seen the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcom X, as well as race riots in most major Northeastern cities. These events haunt the denizens of Wilson’s beloved Hill District in Pittsburgh, even as the rage and violence persists in the streets. This is also the era of black separatism, Black Power and “Black is Beautiful” — concepts that are very much on the minds of Wilson’s characters. As Memphis (Montae Russell), the play’s volatile central character, says: “These niggers around here talking about they black and beautiful. Sounds like they trying to convince themselves. You got to think you ugly to run around shouting you beautiful.”

The action of Two Trains Running takes place in Memphis’s restaurant across from a funeral home and a meat market (both figure prominently in the play) in a run-down and nearly deserted neighborhood. Memphis has one employee, Risa (Nija Okoro), who is both short order cook and waitress, and who Wilson describes as “a young woman who, in an attempt to define herself in terms other than her genitalia, has scarred her legs with a razor.” Okoro brings her character to vivid and complex life with a mix of repressed sultriness, deep compassion and a devotion to Prophet Samuel, a popular local preacher whose body is being prepared for burial at West’s funeral home at the play’s opening.

The only customer in the restaurant when the lights come up is Wolf, the local numbers runner, who Terrell Tilford (in a role originated by Samuel L. Jackson) invests with charisma and a thin veneer of bravado. He is soon joined by Holloway, a beaten-down activist played by the great L.A. actor, Adolphus Ward, in a must-see performance. Ward mines his role for every nuance of hard-earned wisdom and humor he can find, discovering many that might surprise even Wilson.

The cast is rounded out by Sterling (Dorian Missick), a 30-year-old man just released from prison, looking for a new beginning and immediately drawn to Risa; West (Alex Morris), the undertaker, who has grown rich on “niggers killing niggers” and who wants to add Memphis’s building to his holdings; and Hambone (Ellis E. Williams), a man of indeterminate age who has lost his name and his history, consumed by an unkept promise from his white employer. Ellis Williams gives Hambone a harrowing realism — his involuntary tics and stunned silences lift the character out of the realm of the merely symbolic.

The play is permeated by a sense of the injustices that black people have suffered at the hands of whites, and the feeling that the time for putting up with it is over. But the undying glory of the play is August Wilson’s gift for crafting great dialogue. The brilliance of Michele Shay’s direction lies in setting the actors free to explore every nook and cranny of their characters’ emotional ramblings. The result is an explosion of theatrical artistry, abetted by John Iacovelli’s pitch perfect scenic design, Mylette Nora’s costumes, Brian Gale’s lighting and Jeff Gardner’s sound.

Credit also must go to producer Sophina Brown for bringing all these remarkable talents together to create an evening that is a theater lover’s dream — a production that is a true work of art, the kind that doesn’t come around very often.

The Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., West L.A.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m.; through Mar. 3. (855) 326-9945 or augustwilsonstwotrainsrunning.eventbrite.com. Running time: 160 minutes with one intermission.