Christian A. Guerrero and Sara Ornelas are two of the ensemble of singers in Songs About Trains.
If you’re sentimental about past-their-prime forms of transit, and if you can look past the infelicity that is Amtrak, it’s easy to fall in love with trains. They occupy so many iconic moments in American literature and film, and there are so many songs about them. It’s enough to send you into Songs About Trains, a new musical revue, waxing nostalgic. Then note the subtitle: A Celebration of Labor Through Folk Music. If you’re fond of Woody Guthrie and his ilk and tales of Casey Jones and John Henry, well, the show’s already halfway down the track. But Songs About Trains turns out to be even richer than that. It’s not just songs about trains: It can be seen as the whole damn history of American expansion.
The opening up of the West, the grueling labor forced on unwanted immigrants, their exploitation by haves harassing have-nots, the way these underlings nonetheless found pride in their contributions and climbed up into respectability, an effort fueled partly by the rise of unions—it’s all there, and a lot of it is in the songs.
Beto O’Byrne and Julian Mesri sing about railroads. Photographs by Valerie Terranova.
Created by Radical Evolution, a “multidisciplinary performance company,” and directed with great feeling by Rebecca Martinez and Taylor Reynolds, Songs About Trains combines all those songs about trains with letters about trains—or rather about the building of the railroads, the lowliness of rail employment, and other issues, generally written by the workers to their loved ones.
Are these letters real? The vernacular does sound a little contemporary, notably in a series of 1830s missives from Sean, an Irish immigrant doing the dirty work as a primitive railroad track slowly issues out of Malvern, Pa. Authentic or not, they’re heartrending, and whatever his actual ethnicity, Christian A. Guerrero’s Sean has an Irish tenor you’ll want to tuck in your pocket and take home with you. There are also letters from a Chinese laborer on the Union Pacific; a Native American relating a myth about the “Iron Snake” and coyotes; and another heartbreaker from a black Pullman porter, with a surprising, uplifting finish.
In the telling, the audience is treated to an exhaustive mini-history of labor relations, Manifest Destiny, and rare moments in the American adventure where diverse groups, whatever their background, worked together and got along—because, dammit, the railroads needed building, and however cruel the taskmasters or backbreaking the labor, it beat out enduring the Irish potato famine or the wholesale eradication of Native American tribes.
“The audience is treated to an exhaustive mini-history of labor relations, Manifest Destiny, and rare moments in the American adventure.”
Besides Guerrero, the ensemble includes C.K. Edwards, Cedric Lamar, Julian Mesri, Beto O’Byrne, Sara Ornelas, Jessica Ranville, and Xiaoqing Zhang. Not only are their voices golden, each also plays at least one instrument—harmonica, mandolin, violin, cello, guitar, banjo, varieties of percussion. There are many thrilling moments, but none more so than Edwards’s rhythm-of-the-rails tap, a virtuoso display that accelerates to the speed of the 20th Century Limited hightailing it from New York to Chicago in 16 hours. There’s also more modest choreography, always appropriate, by Joya Powell, and wonderfully expressive lighting, by Maria-Cristina Fuste, that always focuses on the right spot and also winningly simulates the flash of an engine headlight rounding a curve.
Ornelas and Xiaoqing Zheng: Ensemble members also play instruments.
Perhaps there is one more chorus of “Wabash Cannonball” or “Way Out in Arkansaw” than there absolutely has to be, and Margaret Montagna’s sound design can be frustrating: Some of the lyrics are indecipherable, though with the repetitive folk-song structures of most of them, if you miss a verse, you’ll probably get another chance to hear it. The 100 minutes fly by, and the cast’s enthusiasm and support of one another, with particularly gorgeous moments in the a cappella sections, mirror the kind of collective spirit that got the railroads built in the first place. Even through their masks, the audience, oddly seated in three sections, including one onstage, looked to be having a wonderful time, and many of the bravura vocal passages were met with “Woo!”s. In this instance, those “Woo!”s were earned.
A coproduction of Working Theater, Radical Evolution, and New Ohio Theatre, Songs About Trains runs through April 23 at the New Ohio Theatre (154 Christopher St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday, with matinees at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, visit radicalevolution.org or theworkingtheater.org.
