Review: Eastbound Jungle

Critic’s Pick

Upstairs at Below Zero Lounge, genuine theater crackles across the stage when the hoboes of Eastbound Jungle settle in. This premier production of a play by recent NKU graduate Brad Cupples is presented as a reading and demonstrates how compelling a tightly written story can be when read by able actors.

The hobo community Cupples has imagined could be a microcosm of any tight-knit group fractured by a tragic event. The play explores “freedom, guilt, and justice,” Cupples says, but that’s not all. Loyalty is another element, so is indecision, and when the character Cleaves talks of justice, it sounds like the flip side of revenge.

(Photo: Jeff Berkle)

Justin Adams is dead-on as Scratch, the observer of the accident that took a life and left the community broken. Wracked by regret, Scratch is goaded by a sly and devious Katie Kershaw as Cleaves, even as Ratchet Jack (Cupples, sitting in for an ailing actor in the performance I saw) tries to keep the group from total breakdown. Warren Bryson gives a cheerful amorality to Caleb, who misses the train out of town because it’s on time for a change, an oversight with fatal consequences. Cupples, playing Ratchet out of necessity, is perhaps a better writer than actor. The other characterizations had more bite.

Set in the present, according to the program, the play takes on a timeless quality by summoning up a society associated with the Depression years. Do people even call themselves hoboes now? The “jungle” of the title is hobo-talk for camp. The trains they all manage to miss are going east. On the back side of the program is “The Hobo Code,” as set in 1894 when the Annual Convention Congress of the Hoboes of America met — not, in fact, in a hobo jungle but in a Chicago hotel. These rules for living are perhaps more rigorous and admirable than those practiced today in corporate and governmental worlds.

Hobos, lacking closets, go in for the layered look, a nuance neatly caught by costume designer Amy Rawe. The spare set, designed by Michael W. Hatton, who also directed, is properly suggestive of a ragtag environment.

Halfway between a radio play and a conventional stage presentation, a reading — like both those forms — can catch you in like crazy when done well. If Eastbound Jungle gives us high tragedy among low life, it also helps us realize that none of us are all that distant, or different, from each other.

– Jane Durrell