Family Drama in Wilson’s Second Home

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The New York Sun

“Two Trains Running,” August Wilson’s bouncy, bluesy tale of dreams abandoned and reclaimed, finds the author in familiar territory. Not just Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the setting for nearly his entire 10-play examination of 20th-century black life, but specifically one of its diners.

Wilson, whose 1992 work is currently receiving a whip-smart revival at the Signature Theatre, loved writing in restaurants. He said a waitress once asked him, “Do you write on napkins because it doesn’t count?” Scribbling on something as unofficial as a napkin allowed him to work from a liminal state; he could scribble down whatever he heard and whatever he thought up without having to pull out a tablet and officially enter “writer” mode. When American Theatre magazine posthumously published his final play, “Radio Golf,” last year, the cover featured a photo of Wilson sitting in a corner booth of the Edison Hotel restaurant.

Set in 1969, not long after Martin Luther King’s assassination and Pittsburgh’s ensuing race riots, “Two Trains Running” does honor to the clinking silverware and boisterous arguments that Wilson enjoyed overhearing. But it also captures the fraught yet firm bonds that unite people who spend meal after meal together. It’s essentially a kitchen-sink family drama, albeit one in which nobody is related and the kitchen sink is tucked away behind the takeout counter. (Derek McLane’s set design vividly conveys the restaurant’s dilapidated but respectable vibe.)

The majority of Wilson’s plays spend as much time exploring the relationships among friends, co-workers, and associates as they do on those found within traditional family units. Wilson’s definition of “family,” in other words, reaches much wider and much further back, encompassing the entire 400-year history of black life in America.

Take Aunt Esther, the neighborhood conjure woman who appears or is described in several of his plays, beginning with “Two Trains.” Esther is not technically the aunt of any of the characters; in 1969, you see, she is 349 years old. “Look like death scared of her,” says Holloway (the invaluable Arthur French), one of many regulars at the unassuming restaurant owned by Memphis Lee (Frankie Faison). “Every time he come around her he just get up and get on away.”

The inhabitants of Memphis’s restaurant have enough grievances to keep Aunt Esther busy for another 300 years. In addition to Memphis himself, whose building is about to be snatched up by the city as part of an urban renewal plan, there’s Risa (January Lavoy), the pretty waitress who took a razor to her legs in an attempt to ward off unwelcome attention, and Wolf (Ron Cephas Jones, off-Broadway’s new go-to guy for playing endearing ne’er-do-wells), who runs the local numbers game from the restaurant phone. Worst off is the mentally ill Hambone (Leon Addison Brown), who was wronged by the white butcher across the street 10 years ago and hasn’t been the same since. The only person in decent shape is Mr. West (Ed Wheeler), who owns the neighborhood funeral home. That puts him in better financial stead than the local clergy, Holloway reasons: “He get more business. More people dying than getting saved.”

West’s business threatens to improve further with the arrival of Sterling Johnson (Chad L. Coleman, in the role that won Larry Fishburne a Tony Award in 1992), who has just finished a five-year stint in the penitentiary and seems destined for a return visit. The hotheaded Sterling is interested in easy money, an upcoming civil rights rally, and Risa — though not necessarily in that order — and his outsize appetites threaten to disrupt the uneasy balance among this cantankerous sextet.

Director Lou Bellamy produced Wilson’s first professional work back in 1983, and the two collaborated repeatedly until Wilson’s death in 2005. With the exception of an occasional tendency to telegraph the play’s more profound lines of dialogue by slowing their pace, Mr. Bellamy’s second-skin comfort with the author’s ambling cadences and with the Signature’s terrific ensemble cast is apparent from beginning to end. (Like most of Wilson’s plays, “Two Trains” clocks in at over three hours and could stand some pruning.) He finds the balance between Memphis’s towering monologues, the needling camaraderie among the customers, and the burgeoning relationship between Sterling and the recalcitrant Risa.

After the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Wilson suggests, the way forward became even murkier for black (and white) America. “Two Trains”depicts the divergent paths with commendable precision: Holloway and West keep their heads down, Risa embraces a counterproductive defiance, Wolf settles for the low-level grift, Memphis takes his fight to the city, and Sterling takes his fight to whoever’s nearby.

In 2004’s “Gem of the Ocean,” the play that finally introduced audiences to ancient Aunt Esther (circa 1904, when she was a mere slip of a thing at 284), one character addresses the difficulty of finding such a path. “It’s hard to be a citizen,” he says. “You gonna have to fight to get that. And time you get it you be surprised how heavy it is.”

But Wilson was willing to concede a certain level of racial advancement in the years between 1904 and 1969. In grumbling about the local protesters, Memphis disputes the entire concept of agitating for freedom. “You born free,” he grumbles. “It’s up to you to maintain it. You born with dignity and everything else. … Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back hold up.”

The progress represented by those two statements, while still insufficient, is heartening nonetheless. “Two Trains Running” serves as a splendid reminder of that progress — and of the similar evolution that occurred on the American stage through August Wilson’s abundant, raucous, overstuffed, joyous creations.

Until January 14 (555 W. 42nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-244-7529).


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