Hartford Stage's Two Trains Running Offers an Antidote for Hard Times

Chances are anyone reading this pretty much feels the country has been – or is – going to hell in a hay basket, depending on their political leanings. Some, like USAID workers and federal employees in DEI offices, find themselves in more personal dire straits as their jobs vanish overnight. Others teeter month to month between having a roof over their heads and homelessness due to rising rents. Or maybe their business is stuck in a dying mall.

These folks will find much to relate to in the ensemble performance of six down-on-their-luck characters who, over a few days, regularly chance upon one another at owner Memphis Lee’s 1969 diner in a production of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, now playing at the Hartford Stage through February 16.

The play is part of the Pulitzer Prize winning author’s American Century Cycle, a ten-play series, each of which depicts the difficult daily life of the African-American community through the lens of each decade of the 20th Century. Two Trains Running zooms in on the late 1960s after the assassination of Martin Luther King and death of Malcolm X.

The diner, located in the Pittsburgh Hill District, is one of the businesses in the neighborhood that is feeling the heat of a collapsing steel industry, impending building demolition, an increasing crime rate, and decreasing customers. That is, except for the funeral parlor across the street which is always busy since there are “more people dying than getting saved,” according to Holloway, one of the diner’s six regular customers, a sage-of-the-eatery who, at 65, has put aside any active resistance against social injustices in favor of communing with Aunt Ester, a local spiritualist purported to be hundreds of years old.

And like Holloway and his coping mechanism, five other diners manage to find a way to lighten their unyielding burdens. Diner owner Lee whose wife has left him refuses to sell his property to the undertaker West as he holds out for a fair offer from the government. Wolf, a numbers runner, offsets with lighthearted resistance, Lee’s displeasure over his use of the diner phone booth as his “office." Waitress Risa, who wards off the opposite sex by scarring her legs with cuts and bruises, risks a jukebox dance with Sterling, the young ex-con hellbent on finding respectable employment. And then there is Hambone, an intellectually disabled patron whose dialogue mostly consists of pleas to retrieve a ham the neighborhood butcher cheated him out of a year ago. His “I want my ham,” refrain mirrors the longing each diner worker and patron has for their unfulfilled ambition. Yet it is Hambone, though absent from the set by the play’s end, who ultimately becomes the deteriorating neighborhood's victor.

And so, though no other character in Two Trains Running" fulfills the full monty of their dreams of justice, love, and wealth, they manage to secure just enough interconnection and self-worth to make it through another day more hopeful than they were the day before – a valuable strategy during hard times in the late 1960s and now.

“Two Trains Runnings” runs through Feb. 16 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays through Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. There is no public performance on Feb. 4. $20-$105. hartfordstage.org.