Black Orpheus and Before Sunrise: both films about chance meetings on trains that evolve into long disquisitions on human love. But where they involve two lovers at their fore, they also include more than just talking. The same transportational motif is present in Arlene Hutton’s Last Train to Nibroc, the first play in The Nibroc Trillogy, presented by Echo Theatre at Theatre Too through May 31. But in this first part of Hutton’s trilogy, the only action comes in the two lovebirds discoursing.

It’s 1940, and May (Morgan Justiss) and Raleigh (Ian Sinclair) are riding a train from LA bound to NYC. Raleigh asks to sit down next to May while she’s reading Magnificent Obsession, some toned down bodice-ripper. Their train is also carrying the dead bodies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West. With America’s sages taking Charon’s modern ferry, the play sets us up to think that May and Raleigh are also riding into death. No, they’re just heading south. May’s going home to KY after a thwarted engagement. And while Raleigh thinks he’s going to go be a writer in NYC, he gets sweet for May and derails for home.

Once they get home, nothing’s as serendipitous as it sounds. After training as an air pilot for the war, Raleigh develops the fits. One night, he has a bad attack and gets sent to the loony bin. Meanwhile, May’s brother has to go off to war. Everyone’s living on rations. May and Raleigh don’t have much to hope for or live on but the spark they find in each other.

Mr. Sinclair’s Ian begins as an effusive, up on his luck writer who thinks he holds a kernel of greatness. He’s soon marred by the vagaries of life, and becomes a stricken, disappointed adult. But he keeps going back to May, and the ways she challenges him finally gets him back on his feet again. His charm goes from being merely delightful to holding a hypnotic attraction.

Ms. Justiss keeps her May at a remove from the audience—never too warm or too vulnerable, and yet always seeming to be on the verge of breakdown. Her coiffed hair sets her apart from Raleigh’s sodden brow, and it’s in that disjuncture between cold composure and sweating entreaty that the tense beauty of their relationship thrives.

But it’s tedious to sit through an hour and a half-long conversation unless you fall in love. We can all imagine the scenes May and Raleigh recount from their lives, but the concentrated effect of a long conversation works just as well with a little action around it. Still, one of love’s labors is to tune out distractions in order to hearken to the beloved other. May and Raleigh’s conversation defies the flotsam and jetsam of the chugga-chugga world, its grandiose literary temptations, and its magnificent obsessions.

With the next two episodes of The Nibroc Trilogy coming to Theatre Too, this act of patience should have broader rewards. As May and Raleigh intimate, they’ve got to give themselves to this first act—the slow unfolding between each other—to come into a larger community beyond their own train of events.

The Nibroc Trilogy
May 7 – 31
Echo Theatre @ Theater Too
P.O. Box 820698
Dallas, TX 75382
214-904-0500
www.echotheatre.org