nothin Take This “A Train” | New Haven Independent

Take This A Train”

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Delossantos and McCarthy.

Angel Cruz is on his knees, trying to get through an Our Father. He’s in a prison cell and it looks like it might be his first night. He’s shaky. He’s scared.

Our Father,” he starts, who art in Heaven.”

That’s when the obscenities start, telling him to quiet down as he tried to stammer through the rest of the prayer. It’s funny and tense, all the same time — setting the stage, thematically and tonally, for everything that is to come in Collective Consciousness Theaters fleet, entertaining, and excoriating production of Jesus Hopped the A Train, running Oct. 25 to Nov. 11.

Hall and Riggins.

Cruz (Jhulenty Delossantos) lands in prison after shooting, in the ass, a preacher who declares himself to be the Son of God. The district attorney is pressing for maximum sentencing. His lawyer Mary Jane (Bridget McCarthy), who is smart and ambitious, thinks she can get Cruz out altogether. Cruz’s situation escalates when his victim dies and he’s assaulted in prison. This lands him in solitary confinement, which means he shares a cell block, though not a cell, with Lucius Jenkins (Terrence Riggins), a charismatic murderer who, having managed to manipulate one guard, D’Amico (Rob Girardin) into doing favors for him, is assigned a newer, tougher guard, Valdez (Jason Hall), who is doing everything he can to impose order.

Cruz and Jenkins are both under the gun, as their respective legal processes grind along with agonizing slowness. Cruz is on trial, but the trial gets more complicated by the day. Jenkins is awaiting possible extradition to Florida, where he’s likely to face the death penalty. But before any of that happens, they have a lot of time on their hands, and for long stretches of their confinement, no one to talk to but each other.

In the hands of celebrated playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, who won a Pulitzer in 2015, this scenario — as timely as ever since the play’s debut in 2000 — becomes absolutely riveting. The two inmates may be stuck in prison, but they are fighting for their lives, and in a spiritual sense, for their souls. They wrestle with a legal system that seems more like a con game than an instrument of justice, even though whether they did their crimes is never really in doubt; like novelist William Gaddis wrote once, Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this one you have the law.” But they also writhe with the moral weight of what they’ve done, particularly as Jenkins, whose crimes are more heinous than Cruz’s, has found God in prison, while Cruz’s faith is considerably shakier. As the tensions in their respective situations ratchet up, they spar with one other and turn on each other in ways that Guirgis has an uncanny knack for making harrowing and hilarious and back again from one moment to the next. It’s a razor-sharp script with not a line wasted.

And director Dexter J. Singleton, who is also CCT’s executive artistic director, knows what to do with it. He keeps the pacing tight when it needs to be, conveying the rising pressure that drives the play. At the same time he allows room for the play’s longer monologues, particularly from Jenkins, to breathe — portraying the long periods of nothingness that accompany the inmates’ solitary confinement. The actors are all terrific. Delossantos expertly peels back the layers of his character to show the thoughtful, troubled youth beneath the street-smart exterior. McCarthy excels at showing the vulnerability beneath her character’s cockiness. Even the two prison guards, who have less to do than the other characters, are able to develop them. By the end of the play, Girardin allows us to feel a little conflicted about how nice D’Amico should have been to his inmate, while Hall makes Valdez first easy to dislike and then deeper and richer as we understand more of the situation he’s dealing with.

Riggins and Delossantos.

But the play rests on Terrence Riggins’s shoulders as Jenkins, both the most likable and the most terrifying character in the play. It’s easy to imagine an actor playing Jenkins as a near-mythic figure, a murderer who becomes born again behind bars. A stumbling performance might turn the character into a monster. Riggins plays him, expertly, as a man, deeply complicated and fatally flawed, and in doing so, spins the themes of the play — the impossibility of ever knowing what real justice looks like in this life, the quest for redemption — around and around, drawing out sympathy in one line, inducing shudders in the next.

It makes the matches between Jenkins and Cruz, the heart of the play, a vertiginous mashup of counseling session and prizefight. Together they make a lot of headway into some very tough questions about faith and and moral responsibility. They earn every answer they get, even if nobody gets off the hook.

Jesus Hopped the A Train runs at Collective Consciousness Theatre in Erector Square, 315 Peck St., Oct. 25 to Nov. 11. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.

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