Trains Running (August Wilson) P.565 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". WolfA numbers runner who sometimes uses the diner as his office.RisaThe diner's waitress and cook.HollowayA regular who speaks out against the constant oppression of African Americans.SterlingJust released from jail, he needs to find a way to make a living.HamboneA man who stands up for what he believes he deserves.WestThe 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 pai...
