In ”Two Trains Running,” the latest chapter in his decade-by-decade chronicle of black American life in this century, August Wilson arrives at a destination that burns almost too brightly in memory to pass for history.
”Two Trains Running” is Wilson`s account of the 1960s, unfurling at that moment when racial conflict and the Vietnam War were bringing the nation to the brink of self-immolation.
Yet Wilson`s play, at the Walter Kerr Theater, never speaks of Watts or Vietnam or a march on Washington. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is mentioned only once.
The garrulous characters, the regulars at a Pittsburgh ghetto lunch counter in 1969, are witnesses to history too removed from the front lines to harbor more than the faintest fantasies of justice. They invest their hopes in playing the numbers, not in distant leaders sowing lofty dreams of change.
So determined is ”Two Trains Running” to avoid red-letter events and larger-than-life heroes that it is easily Wilson`s most adventurous and honest attempt to reveal the intimate heart of history.
As might be expected in a work that departs from every Wilson effort except ”Joe Turner`s Come and Gone” in its experimental will to demolish the manufactured confrontations of well-made drama, ”Two Trains Running” is not without blind alleys. And it is compromised by a somewhat bombastic production, staged by the author`s longtime collaborator Lloyd Richards, that sometimes takes off running in a different direction from the writing. But the play rides high on the flavorsome talk that is a Wilson staple. The glorious storytelling serves not merely as picturesque, sometimes touching and often funny theater but as a penetrating revelation of a world hidden from view to those outside it.
Much of the talk is prompted by two deaths that filter into Memphis Lee`s restaurant, itself doomed to be demolished. The waitress, Risa (Cynthia Martells), grieves for Prophet Samuel, an evangelist whose attainments included a cache of jewelry, a white Cadillac, a harem, and a huge flock that is viewing his open casket down the street.
The one stranger to visit Memphis Lee`s, a newly released convict named Sterling (Larry Fishburne), is latently preoccupied with the 1965
assassination of Malcolm X, not out of any deep ideological convictions but because a rally in the fallen radical`s name at the local Savoy Ballroom gives him a pretext to ask Risa for a date.
Memphis (Al White), who is negotiating a price for the city`s demolition of his restaurant, is confident he can beat the white man at his own game as long as he knows the rules. To him, those who argue that ”black is beautiful” sound like ”they`re trying to convince themselves.”
Holloway (Roscoe Lee Browne), a retired house painter turned cracker-barrel philosopher, is not only scathing about white men who exploit black labor but also about any effort by what he calls ”niggers” to fight back. He sends anyone with a grievance to a mysterious, unseen prophet, the supposedly 322-year-old Aunt Ester, the neighborhood`s subliminal repository of its buried African identity and a magical universe of faith and superstitions.
In some of the richest and most hilarious arias, the marvelously dyspeptic Browne encapsulates the whole economic history of the United States into an explosive formula and reminisces scathingly of a grandfather so enthralled by the plantation mentality he could not wait to die and pick heaven`s cotton for a white God.
Even nastier gallows humor is provided by West (Chuck Patterson), an undertaker whose practical view of death has made him perhaps the community`s keenest social observer and certainly its wealthiest entrepreneur.
