Two Trains Running Book

Wilson continues his quest to reinvent the play each time he writes one. He lays raw the ugliness of the era, which presses down on the characters more overtly than in some of his other plays (where the era tends to bleed in more quietly). Everything in Two Trains Running is high stakes, and it plays out in a high stakes era: 1969. Malcom X and King are dead; the civil rights era is in transition. With minimal space and numerous plot points and relationships to play out, Wilson is even more sparse--and somehow more sprawling. One of the most powerful scenes comes where Memphis details being run off his own farm--and watching white men kill his mule by gutting it in front of him, with the very real threat that he is likely next. The pointed, cold violence of hate--and the threat in it for Memphis--is palpable. One cannot hear this but fear for him, even though we're hearing him tell it of his own past; even though he is, after all, fiction. But the fear is real; and one wonders how he survived--that they didn't murder him; that he didn't get lost in a quest for vengeance.

Though the play's style is distinct, I recognized several (welcome) recurring themes. We have Holloway, the philosopher/Greek chorus. We have characters whose pasts have been wronged and packed with loss. And we have the disparate characters who have woven or are weaving a set of relationships and a place to belong. Like Jitney, that place is on the verge of being lost. But the whole play vibrates at a higher pitch; it lives in a tense, aggressive place.

The rest if my comments engage with the conclusion, so stop here if you don't want spoilers. Suffice to say that Wilson's talents do not fail him halfway through his cycle.

[SPOILERS]
It is the ending that makes this play beautiful--and it is beautiful because Wilson has earned it. There is a quotation that comes to mind from The Doctor Dances (again--because I'm so classy like that). It isn't a perfect fit (in fact, it seems downright odd for a book that features a funeral director as a main cast member, two funerals, and a memorial for an assassinated leader)--but it works.

Where Ma Rainey's conclusion was a slap across the face, here the inevitability of a similar ending practically shouts here. Nearly every scene, a conflict develops that could trigger loss, violence, unfairness--some combination thereof. Having read about Levee, one sees him on every page of Two Trains Running. There is Sterling, newly released from prison, anxious to make his way, volatile enough to be worrisome to the rest of the characters--and who won a lottery only to be given only half the expected winnings. There is Memphis, the owner of a once-thriving business, pigeonholed by a changing neighborhood, who refuses to sell his business in advance of the government's forcible procurement of his property because he will not accept less than $25,000 for it. There is Hambone, mentally ill man who showed up every day, hoping the man who once cheated him of a ham would make it right. Also, there is the wake and funeral of a pastor, who attracted a massive and potentially rowdy crowd of fans and detractors; the burning of a business for insurance and the speculation that it would be blamed on someone--possibly a member of the Black Panthers, who have made an appearance in the town. There are actual guns procured at points in the story. And of course, looming over (and underpinning) all of this, adding fuel to the conflicts, is the violent oppression that permeated the city in that era. It was an ugly time, and that tension broiled always in this story. It made me fear the unabashed hope and faith that Memphis, Hambone, and Sterling had that they, the righteous, would be vindicated. This was a time when the fighters were the first to be attacked. And I've read enough of Wilson now to know he does not pull punches against such hope. The tragedy, the fury, the final snapping point seemed unavoidable. Memphis would be screwed, by West or the government; Hambone will be imprisoned or falsely accused, Sterling will snap and end up back in the penitentiary. Or dead. Something had to give.

But then.

"Everybody lives, Rose. Just this once, everybody lives!"

It isn't quite true. Not everyone. But--everyone lived in that there was, in the end, vindication, and triumph, and peace. There was justice of a sort even for Hambone (who died, and for whom Sterling finally got the ham). It isn't sentimental or easy; how can it be, after the pages that came before, and the plays that came before? How can it be, after Levee? After all the people who had already died, or lost, or imprisoned? Nor does it undermine the threat they faced, the fear we felt for them. It is an eye in the storm; but it is one worth celebrating. The war rages around it. Wilson knows it and we know it. But just this once: just this once. And it is beautiful.