Everyone always talks about the "girl" portrayed by Emily Blunt in the "The Girl on the Train" movie but the play — which opened at Lyric Arts Friday — would like to remind us there's another title character.
"The train is intrinsic to the whole production. It felt like it needed to be the heartbeat of the play," said director Anna Crace of "Train," in which Rachel, an alcoholic, is commuting when she believes she witnesses a crime. "It feels like the characters are on the track and can't get off, so we're working towards creating a lurch that begins every scene. Each scene is like a stop on the train line, so [Rachel is] kind of falling into each one."
That was one of the first decisions by Crace, who's also manager of new play development for Stages.
Most of the drama's scenes don't take place on a train but, in Rachel's distorted reality, it's all about the blurry vision that drives novelist Paula Hawkins' story: "I was thinking, also with her drinking, that she goes on this journey where it's a surprise to her every time she's in a scene, in the way you can be on a train and you're jolted back to reality."
Crace, who has lived in the United States for several years but still calls herself a Londoner, once considered commuting an intrinsic part of her life: "I actually remember reading [the book] during a commute back in the day — I moved here four years ago. And you do look out the window while you're on the train and imagine people's lives. It's quite normal."
What's not so normal? Figuring out how to put a train on stage.
It has been done, though. "On the Twentieth Century" is almost entirely set in a row of sleeper cabins and the opening of "The Music Man" is on a bumpy train. Chad van Kekerix's surreal Lyric Arts set incorporates subtle railroad tracks in unexpected places, but the train is mostly conceptual.
Crace hopes not having a train onstage allows audiences an entry point to the play. Seeing a specific British vehicle might make it trickier to imagine themselves on a train in Minnesota, she thinks. Although this "Girl" is still set in England, leaving the train to viewers' imaginations will allow them to envision whatever trains they remember.
