COMMUTER TRIP
Every reviewer’s nightmare: the wind chill is 30 below, I’m way the hell west on Grand Avenue, in a neighborhood I never even knew existed, in a gallery I’ve never heard of, with a few folding chairs, a single aluminum scoop lamp clamped to one of the bare ceiling rafters, and no heat save for a grumbling space heater that looks as though it’s been salvaged from the wreck of a DC-10. I’m a long way from the Royal-George.
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Commuter Trip, like all of Roth’s work that I have seen, is structured simply out of anecdotes and observations. But Roth’s insight is so keen, and his story-telling skill so sharp, that he is able to weave a rich tapestry from seemingly unrelated threads. Most impressive is that the interconnectedness of his ideas becomes plain only after the fact. Five or six stories may pass before you realize that story number four reexamined an issue raised in story one. Roth keeps his audience on their toes: revelations flash at the most unexpected moments.
Roth frames his piece around a train trip from New York to Lima, Ohio. This is ostensibly the “master narrative,” the commuter trip in question, to which he continually returns during the course of the performance. The piece begins with this trip: “I hadn’t even sat down yet when a man asked me about the state of my immortal soul.” This train ride offers Roth a myriad of chance encounters: people sitting next to him, people in the station, people working for the railroad. Though the literal train stays on an unwavering course, the metaphorical train allows Roth to wander.
Paradoxically, Commuter Trip does add up, though in a more intuitive than intellectual way. Roth’s characters are generally on the margins of society–or at least devoid of much status. Something about this trip speaks of restoring dignity to those who might otherwise be seen as disposable. This idea is powerfully conveyed in two short anecdotes in the middle of the piece. Roth first describes his grandmother, who “only speaks in euphemisms.” Thus instead of “going to the bathroom” she “voids herself.” Immediately afterward, Roth tells about seeing a man on the train with cuts on his face covered with “flesh-colored” Band-Aids. “But,” Roth points out, “unfortunately they don’t make Band-Aids in the color of his skin.” Something as ordinary as a Band-Aid dismisses the existence of people of color; such people are effectively voided. Whether or not Roth intended the connection, it was a powerful one for me, one that made sense in the overall context.
