Stage

...As usual with such jokes, the risibility quotient diminishes with each repetition, and Wilson or, more likely, the director Lloyd Richards strains to find variations on the offering and the rejecting of the sugar...

...Herb Gardner's Conversations with My Father is another play with a cohesive-divisive group—Eddie Ross's family and the regular patrons of his bar—at the center of an ethnic identity drama...

...Yet, as I write this, a few days after the Los Angeles riots, Two Trains Running seems more of an ancient-history play than it did when I saw it in mid-April...

...I don't know how these niggers think sometimes...

...The play is structured as a memory/quest piece in which Eddie's son Charlie (Tony Shalhoub), who wanders around the edge of the action, tries to understand his father, to erase his resentment at Eddie's dismissive way with him...

...Beyond that, in the larger context of the play, the neighborhood, the black community of the 1960s, in which the play is set, it might almost be a metaphor: a person may not want to use sugar but he wants to have access to sugar so that he can casually not use it...

...A corny joke really...

...In the process of Americanization, he tries to discard his identity as a Jewish immigrant (hence the name Ross), complaining about his wife's haphazard English and mocking Zaretsky, the Yiddish actor who rents a room above the bar...

...Holloway and Memphis argue about whether guns solve or create problems, but the offstage rally celebrating Malcolm X's birthday is a peaceful one...

...I do not know whether or not Charlie found peace, but he certainly 18: 5 June 1992 Commonweal realized that his father was not likely to soften into a sentimental stereotype...

...Yet, there is more to it than that...

...Even Hambone gets his ham, although after his death, but then he never had twenty dollars or a consultation with Aunt Ester...

...Although the group is mildly picturesque and supportive of Eddie on occasion, they are not an ensemble like the one in Two Trains...

...West, the millionaire undertaker, comes regularly to Memphis Lee's restaurant for pie and coffee, and since Risa, who cooks and serves, refuses to offer sugar until it is asked for, he routinely says, hardly breaking the flow of his conversation, "Let me get a little sugar here, Risa...

...He then picks up the dispenser, does not use it, and pushes it away...

...Memphis's story of the killing of his mule down South and Holloway's explanation of "stacking niggers," using the work of blacks to buy blacks, are graphic indications of white oppression...

...Their peripheral position is inevitable for this is a play about Eddie (Judd Hirsch), whom we follow through forty years (1936-76), an abusive and often funny man who browbeats his wife, his children, and his friends...

...Nor is Gardner's grander intention clear...

...The general feel of the play is gentle, the restaurant a shelter which, like the bar in The Time of Your Life, cannot really shut out the world...

...The routine ceases to be a joke at all, becomes a device that emphasizes that the regulars at Memphis's—nicely realized by the ensemble of players—form a family of sorts...

...What Conversations offers, as usual with Gardner, are sharp lines, playable scenes, and—as Judd Hirsch demonstrates—a central character to make an actor's mouth water...

...You can't do nothing without a gun...

...The play works its way to a final benign moment in which everyone joins forces to see that Hambone gets a suitable funeral...

...It is primarily a depiction of a place in which a group of people talk aimlessly, pursue private goals, shore up one another...

...they are background, like the changing decor of Eddie's never changing Canal Street saloon...

...It is a subject that trickles through much of the talk, particularly from Holloway...

...There is a similar joke in the way in which Risa moves, so slowly that she recalls—in parody, I suppose—the Stepin Fetchit style stereotypes from 1930s' movies...

...Perhaps it doesn't matter...

...Even the niggers that swear up and down on two stacks of Bibles that they ain't black...they was down there...

...One of the characters mentions this habitual behavior in case the audience does not pick up on it immediately, and after that all eyes focus on West until the sugar ritual is complete...

...His eye is always on American success in a big way, and if energy, determination, and an acid tongue could do the job, he might actually get out of his Canal Street dump (in fact, Tony Walton's set makes it rather attractive) and triumph in a fancy uptown bar...

...The play focuses on the small group in the restaurant, but it is clear that they are part of a larger community that is taking shape...

...Charlie is a successful writer of pleasant ethnic tales, a bowdlerized version of Eddie and his bar, but it is the real thing that haunts him...

...and there is an offstage wonderworker, Aunt Ester, who is said to be over three hundred years old and who demands only that the seeker throw a twenty dollar bill into the river to make things work in his favor—as they do for Memphis, Sterling, and Risa...

...Wolf, the numbers runner, comments on the size of the crowd: "Everybody was down there...

...one can almost hear Mantan Moreland saying, "Feets, do your duty...

...There is hope in Hambone's funeral and in the 1960s' promises...

...Talking about Black Power with their hands and their pockets empty...

...In the kind of irony that Gardner likes, Zaretsky dies leaving a large sum of money he has accumulated from a program, based on the presumably dead Yiddish theater, that he had carried to Jewish groups around the country...

...Risa's customary pace sets the placid rhythm in the restaurant, and her sudden rush suggests that expenditure of energy rests on a real goal...

...was Eddie a failed barkeep because he was a de-ethnicized Jew or an unpleasant person or a dreamer disguised as a pragmatist...

...There is a resident philosopher in Holloway, who sits at his regular table offering comments, advice, anecdotes...

...When Sterling, to whom she is attracted, goes out to face the numbers boss, she races after him, legs churning, and gets a laugh from the audience...

...For a play with so many subplots, Two Trains is an almost plotless play...

...GERALD WEALES...

...The other force ruffling the lives in the restaurant is the new call for Black Power which Memphis dismisses on the assumption that a man makes his own power...

...He is a slightly retarded character, like the trumpeter in Fences, who constantly repeats that he wants his ham, promised payment for a job that he did long ago for the local butcher...