Sleeper Hit | Adam Burgess turns on the charm for Kendra Connor in Last Train to Nibroc.
DETAILS
Directed by John Sproule. Written by Arlene Hutton. Starring Adam Burgess and Kendra Connor. Varscona Theatre (10329-83 Ave). To Mar 8. Tickets available through TIX on the Square (420-1757/www.tixonthesquare.ca).
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Everyone knows the feeling. You take your seat on a bus or plane, and find yourself instantly attracted to the stranger sitting next to you. They might not be traditionally beautiful or glamourous, but you’re drawn to them all the same. So you try to subtly glean details about their life based on what you can see — what book they’re reading, what kind of shoes they have on — in an attempt to find a conversational entry point.
But while this experience is universal, most people don’t follow through on the next step. For whatever reason they chicken out of the actual conversation, and step off that bus or plane without having said a single word to the other person, wondering for weeks or even years afterward what might have happened if they’d been just a little bit bolder.
The two characters in Arlene Hutton’s Last Train To Nibroc, however, do not have this problem. As soon as the recently discharged soldier Raleigh plunks himself down beside May, a bristly but animated woman who’s just called off her engagement, they strike up a rapid-fire conversation that will — not to be too melodramatic about it — change their lives forever. One of the play’s many refreshing successes is that it finds such high-stakes drama not in exaggerated, often unreal devices like adultery or murder, but in the simple process of falling in love. Of course, even that’s a lot harder than it sounds.
Nibroc is broken into three half-hour segments, each of which consists of a long, uninterrupted conversation between Raleigh and May. The first takes place in 1940, on a train leaving Los Angeles for Kentucky, where by fluke they both grew up; by the final scene, three years have passed, and both of them have changed in ways they’d prefer not to acknowledge. Their relationship develops slowly, to say the least, but it’s the steady, assured pace of a tortoise, never to be derailed for good.
Considering there’s nothing onstage but them and a bench, Burgess and Connor need to do some serious heavy lifting to make the script move, and both pull it off. They wring a lot of complex emotions from within their characters as well as from one another, and they skip ably along as Raleigh and May’s conversation rollercoasters from joy to anguish to a mix of the two and back again. They’ve got chemistry, and even their southern accents don’t get in the way; judging from this, as well as their stellar work together in last year’s Maggie-Now, these two are surely among the best young actors the city has to offer.
One of my bad habits as a theatregoer is that I often feel the need to check what time it is during a show, no matter how much I’m enjoying myself. It looks bad, I know, but for some reason that’s the first place my brain goes when I get the least bit distracted.
I didn’t check the time once during Last Train to Nibroc.
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