Two Plays Running
August Wilson’s matched set
By Don Shirley
Within two years after August Wilson’s death in 2005, L.A. saw revivals of most of his best plays – Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Jitney, The Piano Lesson and two versions of Fences. Unfortunately, four of these five productions were inside sub-100-seat theaters where the actors are barely paid, and none of them occurred in the city of L.A.’s shiny new Holden Performing Arts Center.
Opened in 2003 on the site of the old Ebony Showcase theater on Washington Boulevard in a traditionally black neighborhood, the 400-seat Holden is the kind of venue Wilson would have loved. He was a vocal champion of black neighborhood theaters, even though his own plays became famous via a network of theater companies that were hardly black-specific.
In L.A., however, no black-specific theater companies had the resources to perform Wilson’s – or anyone’s – plays at the Holden. In recent decades, the only indigenous L.A. companies that were dedicated primarily to African American plays operated – and then only sporadically – in sub-100-seat theaters.
So it was wonderful to hear that a new company called Ebony Repertory Theatre had finally gathered the wherewithal to produce at the Holden. Just before Wilson’s Two Trains Running opened last Friday, founder/producer Wren T. Brown told the audience that he had grown up within 100 yards of the theater’s site. The neighborhood is no longer as black as it once was, judging from the nearby Latino businesses. But it’s closer in spirit to Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where most of Wilson’s plays are set, than are the neighborhoods where those Wilson revivals in 2006 and 2007 took place.
It’s too bad that the Ebony wasn’t around two years ago. Then it might have opened with one of the plays that are generally considered to make up Wilson’s top tier. (The only such play that hasn’t had a recent revival here is Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – perhaps because it had been revived more frequently prior to Wilson’s death than most of his other A-list plays.)
Instead, the Ebony chose Two Trains Running, which belongs on Wilson’s B-list. Set in 1969 in a Hill District greasy-spoon cafe, which is about to be sold and then demolished to make way for an urban renewal project, the play emphasizes Wilson’s tendency to create vivid, often desperate conversationalists who keep talking and talking, at the expense of dramatic momentum and cohesion. Almost all of the important narrative developments take place offstage. The stage itself is reserved primarily for loquacious reactions. Only two of the seven characters remain relatively quiet – and they (played by Michole Briana White and Ellis E. Williams) become more fascinating precisely because of their reticence.
Slated to begin at 8 p.m., the opening night performance ended at 11:25. Director Israel Hicks should have done a judicious trimming or quickened the pace of the dialogue.
Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean also opened last weekend, at the smaller Fountain Theatre. These “two plays running” make a fine match – in Two Trains, you hear about the offstage sage Aunt Ester, with her Methuselah-like ability to survive for hundreds of years, and in Gem, you actually get to meet her, back in 1904. Compared to the Two Trains plot, more of the action in Gem happens in front of our eyes. But Gem is weakened by an unlikely offstage development that arbitrarily pivots the narrative in the second act.
Still, I prefer Gem to Two Trains. Director Ben Bradley, who also staged the Fountain’s Joe Turner’s in 2006, overcomes small-theater design limitations. And it’s great to see two strong women in Gem (played by Juanita Jennings and Tené Carter Miller), compared to the mostly male chatterboxes in Two Trains.
Two Trains Running, Holden Performing Arts Center, mid-city L.A., (323) 964-9766. ebonyrepertorytheatre.org. Closes Nov. 9.
Gem of the Ocean, Fountain Theatre, southeast Hollywood, (323) 663-1525. FountainTheatre.com. Closes Nov. 16.
For more reviews, go to lacitybeat.com and click on Currently Playing.
Published: 10/15/2008
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