Pullman Car Hiawatha

In March 2019, the Leland and Gray Players took the play Pullman Car Hiawatha to the Vermont Drama festival at St. Johnsbury. This beautiful one act, written by Thornton Wilder told the story of a woman's death as seen through a metaphorical train.

Fiona Scott as the train conductor Train passengers as Peter Broussard, Abbie Hazelton, Spencer Butynski and Sam Thibault

Batikan Cinar as the Turkish Ghost, Darby Davis as The Tramp and Tori MacKay as The Weather

Trevor Hazelton as The Field and Stephen Shine as Grovers Comers Ohio

Harriet, having died, is brought to heaven by the angels and the community around her

Cast and Techie photos

American playwright Thornton Wilder wrote Pullman Car Hiawatha in 1931. Immediately upon reading it, I noticed the ways in which it mirrors his famous full-length Pulitzer Prize play, Our Town, written in 1938. We can see strong parallels between the two plays with characters and theme. For instance, both plays have a Stage Manager character that leads the audience through a journey that focuses on the human condition. Both plays have similar town names (“Grover’s Corners” in Our Town and “Grover’s Comer’s” in Pullman Car Hiawatha.) Furthermore, the main protagonists in both plays face a similar conflict. Emily from Our Town dies and refuses to join the dead until she says goodbye to those she loves, by reliving a day from her youth. This is similar to Harriet from Pullman Car Hiawatha, who will not let the Archangels take her to the afterlife until she bids her life goodbye. In both plays, Thornton Wilder takes a simplified approach to reality with minimal set, props,and costumes, and adds surrealism by blurring the line between heaven and earth.

I picked the play Pullman Car Hiawatha because it speaks to the profoundness of our existence. I am fascinated by journeys of all kinds and in this play, we take a metaphysical journey to the heart of mankind. We start in a physical journey that begins in New York and ends in Chicago, via the Hiawatha train. The passengers in this train are in the “berths” or “compartments,”traveling in a little box which speeds through time, not stopping to look at life. This reflects how people in our society are often stuck in a self-consuming cubicle of conformity. We muse over trivial issues, blindly follow orders and snap at each other without concern. Surprisingly, the character Harriet stops this train (and this pattern) with her death. The walls of the train fall away and suddenly we see the landscape personified around us: a field telling us about her world of mice, two different towns in Ohio with concern for the wellbeing of their citizens, a ghost who wants to be remembered for his contribution to the world and a “tramp” who feels her journey on the train is just as important as anyone else’s.

As the play continues, The Stage Manager shifts our focus so we understand the train’s position “geographically, meteorologically, astronomically and theologically considered,” meaning that he wants us to investigate this moment in life through a vaster telescope of vision. From this point on, the journey transforms into the abstract, which forces us, as an audience, to turn philosophical as we ponder our own significance on earth. We remember that we are humble human beings and our existence, though important, is small in comparison to the larger world around us. We wonder how to connect a thread from our hearts to all points of the universe. Each moment of our lives is not only measured by our breath, but also the minutes and hours that tick, the planets that spin and dance above us, and the archangels who carry us when it’s time to go. Simply speaking: every moment is significant in the eyes of the greater universe, and we should be aware that our existence has weight and meaning. Wilder wants us to dissect our existence so that we feel alive and awake to the truth that defines us. Finally, we learn that reality is a farce if we can’t see its transparency.