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Trains are ideal settings for drama, a point well made by Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith. Trains are enclosures speeding through space and time, and unlike planes and automobiles, they allow passengers a greater degree of movement and interaction. Strangers can get to know one another—or not.
Keith Bunin’s play The Coast Starlight is set on the Amtrak sleeper by that name that skirts along the Pacific coast from LA to Seattle. In real life, the journey takes 35 hours, but Bunin condenses time to one hour, 30 minutes, as he explores the lives of six passengers, strangers traveling together in a single coach. They are locked inside their own thoughts and concerns. Connections are elusive.
The Milwaukee Rep’s artistic director, Mark Clements, discovered the play last year at New York’s Lincoln Center. “Ninety-five percent of the dialogue and conversations between the protagonists, are imagined or assumed,” Clements says. “The characters are all at different emotionally pivotal places within their lives and desperately seeking answers about themselves, and all sense some kind of concern for one young man aboard the train.”
The Coast Starlight builds on the idea that passengers on a journey might find themselves wondering about their fellow travelers. “This play imagines what we might say, or ask, of our fellow traveler’s if we had the courage to do so, fulfilling inner longings,” Clements says. “It’s so cool! I have never worked on anything quite like this before that takes this particular narrative approach.”
The play’s six characters are distinct, each with their own challenges. Clements explains. “TJ is a young man in his 20s hiding a dark secret, Jane is a young artist who is on her way to end a relationship … maybe? Liz is a woman in her late 30s in a vicious cycle of bouncing from one relationship to another. Ed is a middle-aged father trying to escape his hellish, alcohol infused lifestyle, and desperate to get off life’s treadmill at any cost for something that offers solace. And Anna is a successful professional woman, trying to justify or assuage her family guilt.”
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For casting, Clements “was looking for actors who could play a broad range of emotions, and who had the ability to be able to switch to and fro on a dime, be poignant and funny, and have the intellect to tap into this very demanding style of narrative.” The Coast Starlight stars Jack Ball, Emily S. Chang, Yadira Correa, Kelley Faulkner, Justin Huen and Jonathan Wainwright.
Will Clements recreate the interior of a passenger train for staging The Coast Starlight? “The play is a kind of fractured memory piece, and so doesn’t really call for a literal reading of this space. My regular collaborator, Jason Fassl, has designed the set, lighting and projections on this production, and has come up with some very ingenious ideas for us to play with and align with the original music/soundscape created by Josh Schmidt.”
Sept. 3-Oct. 6 at Stiemke Studio. For tickets, visit milwaukeerep.com.
