[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is a Letter to the Editor, written and submitted by a verified resident. It represents the opinion of the author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of South King Media or its staff.]
Maggie and Eric –
Thanks so much for staging the outstanding production by BAT of Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight. I caught a recent performance of this play and was left sitting in my seat after house lights came up afterwards, still grappling with the implications and deep feelings that the piece had evoked.
The play’s premise is deceptively simple: six strangers, stuck together on a train which ostensibly traces a route from Los Angeles to Seattle but may as well be running backwards, forwards and sideways across time, as the passengers’ lives collide and tangle in the shared space.
All aboard, the six characters perform in a memory play where the barrier between wary interior thoughts and tentative, hopeful expression is blurred and often nonexistent. Various little interactions between the roles sprout alternate timelines, where we see the results of the word not spoken or the gesture not made laid out in stark relief.
By the play’s climax, we have borne witness to the exposure of deep secrets, aching vulnerabilities and raw emotion; but ultimately all characters come away from the experience changed by the random encounter. They—like the audience—are simply living in the gap between past and future, just trying to make sense of their lives and their world.
I absolutely loved this play; I greatly appreciate what it suggests about (re)discovering our identity and purpose, through overcoming resistance to make connections with one another. There are strong reminders throughout that ‘verbally’ is only one of the means how we speak to other people in life. And not since the 1998 film Run Lola Run have I been so captivated by a story that plainly shows how small events can have huge, even life-changing consequences.
The ensemble cast is uniformly terrific, each getting turns to peel back their character’s layers as they intermingle in various combinations over the course of the play. Maggie Larrick’s expert direction and the subtle, evocative production design resulted in a meaningful evening of dream theater…where we learn that even a thousand-mile interstate journey by rail may be nothing compared to the distances we sometimes have to traverse, in order to find ourselves.
– George “Boomer” Counts
[Read more about BAT’s “The Coast Starlight” here.]
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