The time is 1969. The place is Pittsburgh, more specifically The Hill (or Black) District, most specifically a restaurant going downhill because its area’s slated for destruction as urban renewal. A first production problem at Arden Theater’s staging of Two Trains Running is that the restaurant’s sign and entrance with unused cashier’s counter space is angled so it’s readable only from the audience’s left. The sign covers projections on opposite outer walls that seem to have important pictures but who knows? Sidewalks so engulf the restaurant that the funeral home author August Wilson put into his script doesn’t seem to exist. The funeral home is/was important because the restaurant atmosphere is funereal. The area is dying. I lived briefly near that area a few years before 1969, but nothing onstage looked familiar to me. Memphis (a stand-out Johnnie Hobbs Jr.) is the owner who wants to sell his restaurant but is fighting City Hall for the right price. He hopes to return to the South and claim property he owned but was removed from years ago. He resents Wolf (Darian Dauchan), nondescript in all ways but ambition, who has no family and is a runner in a numbers racquet. Memphis gets after him for using the phone “in a legitimate business.” At a time of African-American growing activism, Memphis feels force is the only Black Power that succeeds. Holloway (Damian J. Wallace, steadiest of steady customers) is a philosopher who sums up the Blacks’ situation. They’re out of jobs and money but made it for the White Man. He doesn’t need them now because he has none of the great projects of the past whose success required Blacks’ work. Holloway won’t promote love between the races. He feels it’s speculative, then costly. Only death is certain. Waitress Risa (Lakisha May, trying hard for dignity) had cut up her legs so as not to attract men. She seems basically kind, shown by her daily free feeding of mentally challenged Hambone, but Risa has no real personality. Is she supposed to represent women of the time? She works, observes everyone and everything they do, but she will not “relate.” Hambone, speaking only two lines incessantly, cries out for the ham he worked for and was cheated of. He’s a natural victim. Played with energy by U. R. [sic], Sterling just left prison. He loves Risa and wants to marry her, to make a better life. But that takes money, and how will he get it? E. Roger Mitchell as West is neither glum nor upbeat but usually sees things as they really are. Under direction by Raelle Myrick-Hodges, the actors all achieve individualization in their portrayals. So where do the running two trains of the title come in? Do they represent hope to Wilson’s people and its opposite, despair? Does one train go toward love, the other, self-love and indifference toward others? Is one train staying slow on old tracks and one going fast on new? And, in reference to the Civil Rights Movement “train”, will the restaurant regulars get on it or jump or be forced off? Or stay on a different track? Their actions within the play should lead to informed speculation, but is that enough? Apparently the director was not disposed to her production answering questions raised by Wilson’s script. So in terms of meaning, the play comes off as not entirely clear, like aforementioned things in the scenic design.
