Theater: Luncheonette 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. W.A.H.III