Money drives us crazy. That is the message of Two Trains Running, the seventh play in August Wilson’s series The Pittsburgh Cycle. The characters can’t stop thinking about it.
The main character, Memphis, the owner of the restaurant in which the play is set, is very clear about how much he paid for the building he owns and what, according to the market, he should get if he sold the property. The young ex-con who shows up at the restaurant in the first act, Sterling, is looking everywhere for a job because he desperately needs money. (He also went to prison for robbing a bank.) The guy who runs the numbers racket for black folks, Wolf, has sacrificed erotic pleasure for money. And West, the man who owns the neighborhood’s funeral home, the richest person in the play, who, since being widowed, has substituted the stuff that makes the world go round for marital happiness.
