"...Naomi Wallace, the thirty-eight year-old Kentucky
playwright at work here, received a MacArthur `genius grant' last week, and
TRESTLE AT POPE LICK CREEK, her lovely, strikingly poetic Depression-era
play...certainly illustrates what makes her deserving.... the play sometimes
seems like a blend of Ingmar Bergman and Horton Foote, with Thornton Wilder on
the side....
TRESTLE is set in 1936 in a in a town so dull that the only thing
young people can pit themselves against, the only thing greater than them, is
the 7:10 train with its 153-ton engine and deafening roar. So we find Dalton and
Pace, who becomes his girlfriend despite his repeated insistence that she is not
pretty, making plans to test themselves by trying to outrun the train on a
trestle a hundred feet above a dry creek bed. Another boy from their town tried it
recently and died....
By the end, the play, like that train, has built up a full
head of steam and we feel its power."
Anita Gates, The New York Times
"...TRESTLE is an often poignant,
nonlinear-narrative coming-of-age story that's set in 1936 in a `town outside a
city, somewhere in the United States.... ...TRESTLE is at once charming and
haunting....you'll view it with wonder along the way."
Sam Whitehead, Time
Out
"...The honor for the most original and memorable
work of this year's 22nd Humana Festival goes to another Kentuckian, Naomi
Wallace, for her brilliant THE TRESTLE AT POPE LICK CREEK....
After the two-act
play ended with an erotic, gender-twisted climax, there was a moment in the
darkness when I thought: `This must be how it felt when people saw A STREETCAR
NAMED DESIRE for the very first time.'
Like Tennessee Williams' daring play,
Wallace's work introduces a new level of sexual honesty with a fresh mature
voice. TRESTLE wraps its five characters in a metaphorical drama within a
romantic and tragic mystery. It's a complicated, interwoven play that moves back
and forth in time between past and present, with layers of meaning that overlap
and build upon each other. Despite its depth of symbolism and clear political
message, the play is neither stuffy nor strident. A bright ripple of humor funs
through Wallace's play about two sexually charged young people who consider a
game of chicken with an oncoming train. Wallace's keen psychological insights
evoke compassion for her characters. Tears are shed and not only over the pathos
of the play....
The actors stir the emotions with the tender way they expose the
fragility and indomitable beauty of the human spirit, as revealed through
Wallace's words....
If Wallace's plays were a visual art, ONE FLEA SPARE would
be a baroque oil painting, while THE TRESTLE AT POPE LICK CREEK would be a 1930s
American photograph with contrasting lights and shadows and its direct,
unsentimental and uncensored gaze into the lives of the working class."
Judith Egerton, Courier-Journal, Louisville
originally produced at Actors Theater of Louisville
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