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REVIEWS, Page 65THEATERLuncheonette Tone Poem
TITLE: Two Trains Running
AUTHOR: August Wilson
WHERE: Broadway
THE BOTTOM LINE: The foremost American stage voice of his
generation does it again, with delicacy and maturity.
Before August Wilson was a playwright, he was a poet.
Although he came to the theater out of the black anger and
community activism of the '60s, he was always more interested
in language than in agenda, more sensitive to metaphors than to
manifestos. At his lyrical best, which he certainly is in the
remarkable play that reached Broadway last week after two years
of regional development, Wilson can embed subtle and complex
political commentary within the conversational riffs of fully
realized characters. He can also end an almost actionless slice
of life with an abrupt burst of violence, then instantly
transmute that too into a redemptive act of -- well, pure
poetry.
Two Trains Running is Wilson's most delicate and mature
work, if not necessarily his most explosive or dramatic. It has
none of the adrenal family confrontations of his two Pulitzer
prizewinners, Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990). This
one never telegraphs the moments when it is going to turn
philosophical and declaim what it means. Although the subject
is nothing less than the whole range of political, social and
philosophical options by which black people have lived for the
past couple of decades, the story remains, to all appearances,
a glimpse of everyday existence circa 1969 in a run-down
Pittsburgh luncheonette.
The characters, exquisitely played under Lloyd Richards'
direction, are a gallery of types but come across as
individuals. Among them, the restaurant owner, Memphis (Al
White), is a former Mississippian who was cheated of his
property and driven from his farmstead for the crime of
succeeding where a white man had failed. Risa (Cynthia
Martells), the restaurant's sole waitress, gets her hope from
religion and prophecy. Wolf (Anthony Chisholm) is a petty
criminal, a numbers runner for the white Mob who gets along by
going along. Sterling (Larry Fishburne, star of the movie Boyz
N the Hood) is a rambunctious no-hoper, fresh out of prison and
fated to return.
In the showiest role, Roscoe Lee Browne plays the
neighborhood wise man. He has reached age 65 by staying out of
other people's business, suppressing his darkest rages and
heeding a back-street seeress who purports to be 322 years old.
He is at once dignified and absurd, wrongheaded and admirable.
It is such affectionate ambivalence toward all the characters
that makes Wilson's play a vivid and uplifting tone poem and
never a mere polemic.
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III.