Roustabout: The Great Circus Train Wreck!

For the first 20 minutes of Roustabout, you may think you’ve fallen for a notorious carny scam, the bait-and-switch. Though billed as a drama eulogizing the victims of a deadly 1918 train wreck that killed some 60 circus performers, this original play takes its time getting to the center ring. Instead, we get an elaborate and whimsical preamble about the Neo-Futurists themselves and their quest to regain their “cool” by staging a new script, dropped from above by their patron saint, Nigerian pop idol Sade.

Confused? You will be, but you’ll also be entertained. And once you get past the meta-theatrical device to the main event—the factual events of the train wreck and the fictionalized lives of three of its victims—you’ll also be deeply moved. Torrence has unearthed an evocative metaphor in the unsung deaths of these circus performers, and uses the historical facts as a scaffold upon which to hang some strikingly contemporary themes. For Torrence, the World War I setting provides an irresistible parallel to current-day geopolitical struggles; the fact that the agent of destruction was a military train piloted by a sleeping engineer makes musings about the cost of war nearly inescapable.

And while the political critique is at times a bit too pointed, Torrence and the rest of the talented ensemble find the story’s heart in the imagined lives of the victims. For the most part, these stories are sweet, lyrical and fulfilling, offering through their example an unspoken but eloquent critique of war-time politics.—Kay Daly