RIDE THIS TRAIN TO THE END OF THE LINE

One of Chicago’s oldest store-front theaters, City Lit, opens its 45th season with a production of Pulitzer winner, Stephen Adly Gurgis’ Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train. The play debuted almost twenty-five years ago to mostly strong reviews and has been revived frequently; its minimal set and small cast requirement making it a favorite for many small companies.

Michael Dailey, Bradford Stevens

The story is set sometime in the 1990s in a Riker’s Island correctional facility. Angel Cruz, a young Puerto Rican man, shoots a religious cult leader in a misguided attempt to rescue his childhood friend from their clutches. He’s arrested and charged with attempted murder. Charges that are upgraded to first-degree murder when the victim dies from complications during surgery. At Rikers, Angel is assigned a public defender, Mary Jane Hanrahan. Overworked and exhausted, Hanrahan botches their first encounter sending Angel into a rage where he accidentally confesses to the crime to his lawyer. This confession sets the plot of the play into motion. While Hanrahan struggles to come up with a trial strategy to free her client, Angel is assaulted in prison and transferred to protective custody. His only companions, a sadistic prison guard, Valdez, and Lucius Jenkins, a convicted serial killer fighting extradition to a state where he will be executed.

Bradford Stevens

Making their directorial debut, Esteban Andres Cruz, keeps their cast front and center of the production. Eschewing a conventional prison/barbed wire backdrop, the stage is swathed in drop cloths. It doesn’t contribute much to the production, giving it the feel of a padded chamber in a psych ward more than a correctional facility. There is also some entirely unnecessary projection of cattle farms and slaughter houses juxtaposed with images of overcrowded prisons. It’s an obvious point and not one that is particularly useful here. Yes, the US for-profit industrial-prison complex is a machine. Yes, persons of color are disproportionately targeted and given harsher sentences to feed that machine. These are incontrovertible facts. They also belong in a different play. The culpability of the Angel and Lucius is already established beyond a doubt in the first scene of the play. What Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train is concerned with, and indeed, spends the entire second act talking about, is their redemption.

Lenin Izquierdo, Manny Tamayo

Jesus Hopped The ‘A’ Train is an old-fashioned play in that it belongs to a style of theatre that is increasingly falling out of fashion. While more and more modern playwrights aim for naturalistic dialog and settings, this is a play that embraces the artificiality of theatre. The dialog, especially in the second act is hyper-intellectual as it wrestles concepts of guilt, responsibility, the existence of God, and his forgiveness, or lack thereof.  But there is a great deal of value in this type of dialog, and when wielded by fine actors as it is here it achieves a power that no amount of onstage frippery can provide.

Lenin Izquierdo

Let’s get this out of the way. These are five fantastic actors. That said, not all of their performances register as well almost entirely due to problems with the script.

Maria Stephens, Lenin Izquierdo

As the self-righteous, sadistic guard, Valdez, Manny Tamayo does excellent work with an unfortunately one-note character. He does everything one can with it but after every one of his rants I wanted to yell, “You know nothing of his life, Javert!” He does however, get a final line that provides the coda with a moment of surprising grace, and essays it to perfection.

Lenin Izquierdo

Maria Stephens is saddled with Mary Jane Hanrahan, the public defender who in her attempt to free Angel is seeking her own form of redemption. The character is burdened with the most heavy-handed dialog in the play as well as a ton of exposition. She does more with it than most could, but exposition and hectoring is always deadly in drama. There’s also a baffling decision to have her occasionally move up into the audience—I assume, to make the audience feel like they’re in a jury box—but it simply doesn’t work. It’s distracting, and worse, visibly throws the actress off her stride.

Bradford Stevens

A stalwart of the Chicago storefront theatre scene, Michael Dailey plays the kindly guard, D’Amico and he does what great character actors do best: he steps into a scene, improves it immeasurably, and leaves. His line reading of “I just liked the guy”, spoken about a serial killer who tortured people to death, is the most complex and affecting moment of the play.

Michael Dailey

Which brings us to our two leads: Lenin Izquierdo’s Angel Cruz is incendiary on stage, moving effortlessly between anger, fear, guilt, and sorrow, and occasionally humor (he’s got sharp comic timing) sometimes within the same scene. Izquierdo has an astonishingly expressive face and handles his character with a confidence that belies his youth. Even more impressive, Guirgis’ polemical arguments sound entirely natural coming from Angel here, something I’ve never encountered in any other production. His performance even overcomes a rubbish and entirely unnecessary bit of stagecraft involving a fog machine at the end. I’ve never watched this actor perform before and I hope to see him on stage more often in the future.

Maria Stephens

If Izquierdo’s Angel is a raw open wound on stage, Bradford Stevens’ Lucius Jenkins is a tightly controlled ball of energy. It’s a performance that’s so lived-in and naturalistic that the seams do not show (I was significantly jarred by Stevens’ dazzling smile during the curtain call). It works as an excellent counterbalance to Izquierdo and every scene between the two of them is gangbusters.

Maria Stephens

The conversations between Angel and Lucius revolve around weighty questions about guilt, culpability, and redemption. They aren’t concerned with their lives so much as their souls. It is to Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train’s eternal credit that it refuses to provide any easy answers. This is one of the most thought-provoking productions of the year thus far.

Manny Tamayo

photos by Steve Graue

Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train
City Lit
Edgewater Presbyterian Church, 1020 West Bryn Mawr Ave.
Fri and Sat at 7:30; Sun at 3; Mon at 7:30 (August 25)
ends on September 7, 2025
for tickets, call 773.293.3682 or visit City Lit

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago