Will Harrison as T.J. (seated right) and Camila Canó-Flavió as Jane (seated left) notice each other on Amtrak’s northbound Coast Starlight train. In the background, Jon Norman Schneider as Ed and Michelle Wilson as Anna look on.
Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight is one of those “ship of fools” dramas that throw together unacquainted travelers on a common carrier. The title comes from a real passenger-train service running daily from Los Angeles to Seattle. Amtrak’s website promises potential Coast Starlight customers a “grand West Coast train adventure … pass[ing] through Santa Barbara, the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and Portland.” For Bunin’s characters, however, the reality is not so much an adventure as an anxious long-haul.
Noah (Rhys Coiro), an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan, counsels T.J. (Harrison), who’s contemplating desertion from the Navy.
T.J. (Will Harrison) is a medic assigned to the Navy Medical Center at the Camp Pendleton Marine base near San Diego. If he rides the Starlight to its terminus, he’ll miss the departure time for a second deployment to Afghanistan and, consequently, be AWOL. Fearful as he is about the perils of the scheduled return to Bagram Air Base, T.J. is also agitated about deserting. At every station stop, he considers getting off and catching another train back to the military base.
Jane (Camila Canó-Flavió) is a fledgling story-artist at a Hollywood studio. “Every day,” she says, “I sit at my desk and I think about all the things that would’ve made me laugh really hard when I was 7 years old. And then I draw them.” Jane is bound for Washington State to clarify the status of a love affair that may have run its course. To pass time on the trip and allay her nervousness, she is surreptitiously sketching nearby passengers (an activity that permits her to study T.J. closely).
Even before boarding the train, T.J. and Jane notice each other but shy away from disclosing the attraction they feel. As T.J. admits to the audience, “I wanted to lean across the aisle and say to her: I have no idea where I’m headed today—I just decided I’d get on a train and head north.” That spurs Jane to remark: “If he’d told me that, I’m not sure what I would’ve said.”
“The most engaging parts of the play are the character-establishing monologues Bunin gives new arrivals in the train car. ”
With this kind of “I-wanted-to-say” and “I-might’ve-said” dialogue recurring throughout the play, Bunin’s script operates largely in the subjunctive mood. As the playwright explains in an introductory stage direction, “All the passengers we’ll meet are aware of [the audience’s] presence. Sometimes they’ll talk to each other in real life, but more often they’ll address us and each other directly from their thoughts or memories or imagination.” This may be an intriguing experiment for the writer; for spectators, it sows confusion.
The most engaging parts of the play are the character-establishing monologues Bunin gives new arrivals in the train car. These juicy “arias” reveal the dramatis personae vividly and efficiently (even those, such as T.J., who equivocate). Though leavened with humor, the soliloquies are deeply poignant, each a lavish gift for the performer who delivers it.
Noah (Rhys Coiro) is an Army veteran, still recovering from the ravages of active duty in Afghanistan, who doesn’t “talk a whole lot about that stuff anymore.” Liz (Mia Barron) is an exercise instructor fleeing a couples-therapy conference near Salinas where her longtime boyfriend rejected her by telling their fellow participants that he has a “deep chasm inside” that their relationship “simply isn’t able to fill.”
T.J. (Harrison) and Jane (Canó-Flavió) are passengers who feel a mutual attraction during a long train ride. Photographs by T. Charles Erickson.
Ed (John Norman Schneider) relies on booze for solace from a divorce, financial setbacks, and the mind-numbing job he keeps to support his children. Anna (Michelle Wilson) has spent the day in an unfamiliar city identifying the corpse of her drug-wasted brother, completing next-of-kin paperwork, and contending with grief and guilt about their long estrangement.
The Coast Starlight is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha. It’s hard to know whether Bunin had that one-act play at the front of his mind while writing; but, like Wilder, he depicts a handful of distraught strangers contemplating their position in the universe—“geographically, meteorologically, astronomically, [and] theologically,” as one of Wilder’s characters puts it—while traveling through the night.
Anna calls T.J. a “wounded creature,” which is an apt description of all six people in the railcar. In Bunin’s script, their collective sojourn strains toward a hopeful—or, perhaps, therapeutic—resolution, despite the fact that much of the dialogue reflects what’s in the characters’ imaginations and not actual colloquy. The lyrical, Wilder-evoking dénouement owes as much (and perhaps more) to the exquisite Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, as to Bunin’s writing. Despite the excellence of the cast, the emotional power of the final moments is due largely to Arnulfo Maldonado’s elegantly minimalist scenic design, Lap Chi Chu’s atmospheric lighting, and projections by 59 Productions, which supply the glittering stars and planets that connect the six weary travelers to the entire universe.
Lincoln Center Theater’s presentation of The Coast Starlight runs at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater (150 W. 65th St.) through April 16. Evening performances are at 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit lct.org.
