Even in death, goods and services must still be exchanged. So goes the American dream. At the heart of August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running,” now in repertory with “The Comedy of Errors” at American Conservatory Theater, lies a perennial struggle between desire and reality and a dynamic exploration of the circumstances that often prevent the two from meeting.
A.C.T.’s production of Wilson’s classic play is staged by the repertory staff without bombast or flair, putting up the Pittsburgh-set play almost exactly as the late playwright described in his original text, wisely ceding the stage to said text and its performers. Wilson’s words can easily astonish, but it’s this ensemble that makes this production a can’t-miss.
The Acting Company digs into Wilson’s play – set in the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement, after the murders of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. – with gusto. It’s easy to see how much the company relishes inhabiting a cast of characters this layered, as each member forms a dynamic with the next that plays so specifically, yet resonates universally.
“Two Trains Running” takes place inside a restaurant owned by Memphis, a middle-aged Black man whose business is struggling to sustain itself amid an ever-changing Pittsburgh that is consistently getting gentrified by the off-stage, incoming white one-percenters. Risa, his sole employee, serves a rotating door of guests: Holloway, Sterling, West, Wolf and Hambone, the last of whom is so named after his penchant for the phrase: “He gon’ give me my ham.”
Each character’s name bears a great, unseen weight. Memphis, whose bluster and might both come from a tragedy in the Deep South, is quick to point out his demands as a self-made man, most of which rely on extenuating circumstances. Wolf, a lone wolf with a “for my own” mentality that isolates him from deeper connections, never gnarls save for one empty gesture. West stands a spectre of death who hangs over the show, energized but clad in all-black just the same, befitting for a funeral parlor owner. “Go west, young man,” as Horace Greeley said.
With this committed cast, some of their minor stumbles through lines and rushing through scenes during the opening night performance didn’t prevent every gesture from being deeply felt, even from the rafters. Memphis and Sterling guide the show, with Michael A. Shepperd and James Milord taking the helm of each respective role.
Masculinity transforming and contorting itself across generations of Black men, inherently affected by the racism and capitalistic greed that permeates the bones of American life, guides these characters. Their lives and desires mirror each other as twisted twins. The older Memphis, driven by a need for independence, puts down those who rally for justice and Black Power. Though his building is being targeted for seizure by the city under eminent domain, he demands no less than $25,000 for it and even hires a white lawyer to help him.
Sterling, on the other hand, has just been released from prison and wants to earn on luck. Luck is manifest in the winning numbers that hang over the proceedings on the restaurant’s blackboard, rendered so close yet so far and as ominous as the spectre of death’s long shadow cast by West and his burials, which seem to exist in limbo. Sterling relies on what remains out of his control for his future, but is mobilized by Hambone, a man whose tragedy lies not in his fate but in his reality that it reflects.
Where Memphis and Sterling intersect, beyond intersectional pain, is through the off-stage Aunt Ester, a woman believed to be supernatural whose nebulous age and supposed infinite wisdom guide her customers, including the two men. Through Aunt Ester’s “all-seeing eye,” the allegedly 300-odd-year-old woman makes death seem as immortalizing as anything and desire seem as corrupting as anything. This production hones in on those equalizers that none of us are free from.
The inaction and action of Sterling and Memphis mirror each other with one man dead set on getting what he earns and the other man wanting to earn from luck. Bad luck is much ruminated upon throughout terse exchanges, and Wilson’s words often need more room to breathe than what the cast is allotted by this staging. They bounce off of each other, ablaze in an echo chamber, exactly how these people operate. Though they need more open air to work with, the show itself works nevertheless.
The four walls, three built on-stage with the audience functioning as a living, breathing and rarely broken fourth wall, signify bigger walls closing in on Blackness and life in Pittsburgh, slowly gentrified over the ages by the rich white men who buy out everything that built the city’s foundations.
Risa stands out as the axis around which the show spins, but her interiority is given short shrift by direction that feels too timid to tackle her spoken and unspoken tragedies. However, DeAnna Supplee delivers a quiet storm of a performance that charges her every moment on stage.
Supplee’s Risa laments how West always asks for sugar yet never uses it. Death comes for us all, it asks of us our lives, yet does nothing with them in the end. Sterling finally takes action, ringing the alarms, but not for himself. In life, money and death, transaction never dies. The buyers and sellers just change hands.
“Two Trains Running” runs through May 4 and tickets are on sale now.
Editors Note: This story was updated to correct a caption.
