Memphis (Al White), the cafe’s pragmatic proprietor, is obsessed with getting a fair price for his property from the city, which wants to tear it down. With his new money, he plans to return to Mississippi to confront the white man who ran him off his land decades ago. The retired Holloway (Roscoe Lee Browne), the resident barstool philosopher, puts his faith in the ancient wisdom of a 322-year-old seer named Aunt Esther. At the symbolic center is a deranged monomaniac named Hambone (indelibly played by Sullivan Walker), who over and over repeats the one demand his shattered mind has been reduced to: " I want my ham!" The only woman onstage, the somnambulistic waitress Risa (Cynthia Martells), defines herself by what she doesn’t want: she’s scarred her legs with a razor to ward off men who only look at her as a body.
As thematically rich as it is dramatically discursive, “Two Trains Running” isn’t organized around any single dramatic event. It unfolds as a succession of street-wise arias, and the monologues, in Lloyd Richards’s impressively acted production, often rise to musical eloquence. Wilson leaves it to the audience to pull together his interlocking themes of economics, self-esteem and spirituality. What we witness is not a play about the ’60s, but a form of oral history, in which we’re invited to eavesdrop on the timeless continuum of the African-American experience. These are the stories behind the political slogans, Wilson implies: listen and learn.
