FREE ESSAY ON TRAINS RUNNING (AUGUST WILSON)

TRAINS RUNNING (AUGUST WILSON)

Trains Running (August Wilson) P.565
Memphis
The owner of the diner is waiting for his chance to go back south, and he knows that they
got two trains running every day. 
Wolf
A numbers runner who sometimes uses the diner as his office.
Risa
The diner's waitress and cook.
Holloway
A regular who speaks out against the constant oppression of African Americans.
Sterling
Just released from jail, he needs to find a way to make a living.
Hambone
A man who stands up for what he believes he deserves.
West
The only wealthy man on stage owns the funeral home across the street.
Two Trains Running, set in 1969, is August Wilson's most contemporary play to date. Like
most of his plays, it unfolds in a single location--a diner in Pittsburgh. Memphis, the
diner's owner, is struggling to get a fair price from the city which is buying up the
entire eighborhood for purposes of urban renewal. Memphis' observation that the
neighborhood has been emptied of its commercial and human activities gives an ironic and
grim spin to urban renewal in particular and the progress of African Americans general.
The play asks the question: In the midst of unemployment, death, and a white power
structure allowing few alternative, where do you look for salvation. Do you turn to
Christianity, as embodies in the wealthy but deceased Prophet Samuel, or do you return to
an older African spirituality embodied by the impossibly aged Aunt Ester? Perhaps
salvation lays with Malcolm X and the black power movement, or with Wolf and the numbers
game of a white Mafia.
A host of tragic figures inhabit the diner. Memphis' struggle with the city is essential
to his fate of returning south to get back the land cruel taken from his by white men.
Sterling--just out of prison--is stymied in his attempts to, by any means possible,
support himself. Risa, the waitress, has scarred her legs in an attempt to escape the
prison of physical beauty. Finally, perhaps a symbol of them all, is Hambone. Tens years
ago he painted the grocer's fence, but was paid a chicken when he felt he had earned a
ham. Every day for ten years he has confronted the grocer, requesting and demanding his
ham, until by now the only phrases he utters are I want my ham. and He gonna give me my
ham. 
August Wilson's 1992 play Two Trains Running is, in effect, a kinder, gentler version of
Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing. Both address racial tension between blacks and
whites in the inner city and the violence that can accompany it, but in the play, these
social ills are heard and not seen. 
The cast of TheatreWorks' current production creates a well-realized, if insular,
environment that allows the audience to connect the characters. Wilson has created a
compelling story line for each individual, and the fact that most of the stories have
happy endings doesn't seem contrived. On the contrary, their successes are representative
of African Americans who broke through the color line during the civil rights movement. 
Even a character like , the diner owner who treats his lone waitress, Risa , as a
personal servant, redeems himself through his fight to get the city to pay him what he
wants for his building, which is due to be demolished. Memphis plans to use the money to
return to Mississippi and confront the white man who ran him off his land decades ago.
Memphis' story is at once heartrending and uplifting, as is Abdul-Rashid's reading of it.

Michael McFall plays the key role of Sterling, an ex-con whose anger at not being able to
get a leg up in the world is tempered by a youthful exuberance. It's the latter quality
that allows Sterling to woo Risa, a beautiful young woman who has scarred her legs to
keep away men who want her for her body alone. Brembry's Risa is world-weary in the
extreme; she communicates mostly through sighs and piercing glances at whoever is yanking
her chain at the moment. 
Sterling and Risa's love story is tender, but McFall is even better when his character
befriends Hambone (Don C. Coles), a homeless man. Cheated out of a ham by a white butcher
whose fence he painted, Hambone has spent the last nine years trying to collect his
payment. His vocabulary has been reduced to a single sentence--I want my ham!--and the
scenes in which Sterling helps him increase it to include statements like Black is
beautiful are extremely powerful. The pride that keeps Hambone in the struggle is the
most telling glimpse Wilson's play offers into the shift from civil rights to Black
Power.