On the Bum, or The Next Train Through
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Neal Bell is one of those intensely irritating contemporary playwrights who become so obsessed with creating eccentric characters and making up evocative, poetic speeches that their stories go to smash. Bell’s Ragged Dick, for example, features the odd denizens of a New York City slum circa 1890–mouthy moppets, sharp-tongued whores, weary cops, ragged men–all of whom speak in an arch literary language cribbed from Victorian novels. A pet monkey even delivers a long soliloquy (no kidding) lifted from the Book of Job. But all the fine detail is not only useless but more than a little overwhelming given a story as anemic as the one in Ragged Dick: Jack the Ripper, or a copycat killer, is on the loose in New York.
Bell’s plays also usually overstay their welcome–by hours, not minutes. So On the Bum, or The Next Train Through feels like a revelation. It has all the standard Bell flaws–um, touches: eccentric characters, nonnaturalistic speech, supernatural happenings, stupid puns, a wandering story, pretentious literary allusions, scenes that take forever to get where they’re going. Yet the play works. At the end of its two and a half hours, we’re as riveted by the characters as we were in the beginning. And the very touches that I’ve thought ruined his early work actually advance Bell’s story here, contributing to the rich, resonant whole.
