Two Trains Running

by August Wilson, Laurence Fishburne (Foreword by)

Overview

It is Pittsburgh, 1969. Memphis Lee's diner—and the rest of his block—is scheduled to be torn down, a casualty of the city's renovation project that is sweeping away the buildings of a community, but not its spirit. Memphis stands his ground, determined to make the city pay him what the property is worth, refusing to be swindled out of his land as he was years before in Mississippi. Into this fray come Sterling, the ex-con who embraces the tenets of Malcolm X; Wolf, the bookie who has learned to play by the white man's rules; Risa, a waitress of quiet dignity; and Holloway, resident philosopher and fervent believer in the prophecies of a legendary 322-year-old woman down the street.

Just as sure as an inexorable future looms right around the corner, these people of loud voices and big hearts continue to search, to falter, to hope that they can catch the train that will make the difference. With compassion, humor, and a superb sense of place and time, Wilson paints a vivid portrait of everyday lives in the shadow of great events, and of unsung men and women who are anything but ordinary.

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Laurence Fishburne.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781559363037
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	04/01/2008
Series:	August Wilson's Century Cycle , #7
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

August Wilson (1945–2005) is the most influential and successful African American playwright. A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author, his plays have been produced all over the world.

Editorial Reviews

What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be African American? The work of August Wilson posits an answer by arguing that the African influence is inseparable from and essential to the American experience. Two Trains Running, set at the end of the '60s Black Power movement, tackles that question with the zeal and virtuosity of a master at the height of his powers.
—Laurence Fishburne, from his foreword

These characters are fully imagined—they live…reeling out stories about there past, their angers, their dreams.
—Washington Post

From the Publisher

With this play Wilson reaches the halfway mark in his labors to dramatically limn, one-decade-per-play, twentieth-century black American life. The fifth in the cycle, it is set in 1969 in a commercial-residential part of Pittsburgh slated to fall to a redevelopment scheme; specifically, in a soul-food restaurant run by Memphis Lee and habituated by a collection of characters including, besides Lee and his young cook-washer-waitress Risa, undertaker West (the richest local businessman), just-released convict Sterling, numbers runner Wolf, new Social Security applicant Holloway, and Hambone, a gentle madman preoccupied by the ham he feels the local butcher, a white man, owes him but has never delivered. These six men and one woman exemplify as many ways of living with white oppression and their own personal demons, and their collisions of temperament and motive are as vital and moving as any in American drama.

Ray Olson