Last Thursday, Mer and I headed up to Actors’ Summit Theater (as part of our subscription that friends gave to us). We got to see a play that was new to both of us – The Last Train to Nibroc.

The play is very simple and intimate – it is in three acts that are three days in the lives of a young man who was turned away from joining WW2 because he has epilepsy, and a young woman who is considering becoming a missionary. They meet on a train coming back from California, and it turns out they are both from Kentucky. The play is a study in how their relationship grows from that meeting. It is a patient play, and takes its time telling the tale. Both of the young characters are charming in their own way, and they were played very well by the actors playing the roles. I liked both of them very much.

There was almost no set to speak of – a bench, a stump in one corner of the stage, and for the last act there was a set of steps leading up to a kitchen door. It worked – the point of the play was to focus on the two characters, and the set was the minimum that was needed to make the play function.

On the whole, I liked the play. If I had one complaint, it would be that the characters repeated themselves a lot. It could be that that was how people from rural Kentucky during the 1940s talked, but to my ears, it was just repetitive. The dialogue could have been tightened up probably by 5-10 minutes of the 90 minute play. Still, the characters were interesting, and it was fun to see a play about ordinary people in ordinary circumstances – there were no mystic forces or great kingdoms or huge moral dilemmas. It was a play about the bumpy road to falling in love, and that makes for a good story.