Word: trained
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Playwright Dervis places his two main characters in close quarters--an Amtrak dining car on a train from Chicago to San Francisco. Tom (David Frisch) is a Yippie turned corporate executive. Founder of The Advocate, a left-wing newspaper, he is headed to the West Coast in order to sell its current mainstream incarnation. Busily writing out proposals, he is joined rudely by Spence (George Saulnier), a self-proclaimed, 17-year-old "romantic drifter." What Time charts three hours of their relationship, and falls straight into the one-act trap of revealing every silly detail about the pair...
...kisses him goodbye and informs him that--unlike the last Saturday--he should have no trouble getting to work because she has filled the car with gas, changed the oil, changed the points and plugs and cleaned the interior...all before picking him up at the train station last night...
Vicki starts to perform a mad Apache war dance, spinning and turning in small, violent circles. Twenty feet in front of Vicki, high on the concrete platform, Bridey, Veva and Dianne are shrieking with excitement. As the train comes into view, they begin to spin and dance as if possessed. Bridey calls out to her mother as the train pulls onto the trestle, "Stop! Stop! You'll make it rain! You'll make it rain...
Vicki, who has been dancing as if in a hallucinatory trance the whole time the train was passing, is now screaming at the top of her lungs, "Where's Sandino? Where's my dog? Is he still alive...
Time stands still in Canyoncito for a few precious seconds until Bridey calls down to Vicki, "He's O.K., he's O.K. I see him. He's coming back -- he ran after the train." Enter Sandino, performance star. He comes zooming down from an overpass, jumps a steep embankment, caroms mightily through the creek, stutter-steps around some sage and leaps onto Vicki. Vicki hugs her dog. The train is gone; the land is quiet again...