Two Trains Running

Set in Pittsburgh in 1969, the play takes place in a restaurant. The menu is posted on a board, along with the number 651, which was the winner yesterday in the daily numbers game (numbers running, also called bolita or policy racket, is an illegal lottery system). The restaurant is small and has a counter with four stools, three booths, and a pay phone. It sits across the street from Lutz’s Meat Market and West’s Funeral Home. Wolf, a diner regular, enters from the phone booth, but the phone rings repeatedly, and he keeps answering it. Memphis, the middle-aged man who owns the restaurant, enters and tells Wolf to stop using his phone to run the numbers game, because his lawyer might be trying to get through. Wolf argues, and the two men discuss the merit of the numbers game. Memphis mentions that the number 651 has won twice that week and that it was the number that L. D., a man who is now dead, had always played. Risa, a young woman who cooks and waits tables, enters from the kitchen. Risa has deliberately scarred her legs with a razor blade to deter unwanted male attention.