Two Trains Running
“I’m going back one of these days,” says Memphis Lee in August Wilson’s lyrical comedy Two Trains Running. “All I got to do is find my way down to the train depot. They got two trains running every day.” Wilson’s 1990 play, set in 1969, takes its title from a Muddy Waters blues: “There’s two trains running. . . . One run at midnight and the other jes fo’ day.” For the playwright, the trains symbolize conflicting forces that must be reconciled. South and north, life and death, love and hate, vengeance and mercy, violence and tenderness, fear and courage–the courage to defy injustice but also to make peace with the enemy.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Memphis (Alfred H. Wilson), who runs a diner in Pittsburgh’s impoverished Pill Hill district, has seethed for 40 years because a white man took his property in Tennessee. Lucky to have escaped with his life, he wants to go back and reclaim his land. To raise the funds he wants to sell his restaurant to the city, which would like to demolish it as part of urban renewal. But he’s asking $25,000, much more than he’s been offered. So he continues to dish out meat loaf and collard greens while his customers sit and share stories of racial injustice and black-on-black scandals, white men who cheated them and wives who walked out on them. They speak of Malcolm X, a bold leader cut down in his prime, and Aunt Ester, a local wise woman rumored to be 322 years old. They talk of spirituality and superstition, history and legend.
Today Purlie’s broad caricatures might seem dated, even silly–as when Cotchipee goes on and on about how well he treats his “nigras” and “darkies” while leering at Lutiebelle and threatening Purlie with his whip. “Gone are the days,” as the lyric goes in “Old Black Joe”–gone and good riddance. Except they’re not gone. Not when someone like best-selling piety purveyor William Bennett can say, “You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Purlie still has its place in our world.
PRICE: $17-$25
PRICE: $20-$75
