We meet the star-crossed trio as they board: Esther MacAfee (the lovable, lisping Jennifer Jasper), a trash novel hack whose genre specialty is "Dames in love -- with other dames"; a sultry siren named Cat (as in Cat o' Nine Tails, played by the honey-voiced Shawn Yates); and the naive Louise Muldavane (a cross between Didi Conn and Lucille Ball, played by hysterical Mia Levine). A flood of lesbian sex-as-food analogies follows these introductions -- tamales are tickled, lemons are juiced -- as the attempt is made, rather unsuccessfully, to eke a plot from an abundance of relentless one-liners and a '50s trash literature motif. But an actual plot is superfluous to this show -- neither the audience nor the players seem to require one. Director Kevin Kent (a Seattle favorite who is, it is rumored, a lesbian himself on occasion) keeps the action punching along, and the furiously flying repartee needs nothing so base as a story line to support it.
I won't even begin to speculate upon the Freudian implications behind staging a lesbian love triangle on a speeding train. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and the laughs come so fast in this hyper-witted production that any deeper implications are ultimately overshadowed by its sheer cleverness. You won't walk away from this show a changed or enlightened person, but you will walk away with a smile on your face, a warm, satisfied feeling from having laughed surprisingly hard, and a whole new repertoire of euphemisms for "vagina." What more could a theatergoer ask for?