Bunin, Keith

Keith Bunin’s gentle, rueful play at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater settles down among six passengers traveling from Los Angeles to Seattle.A northbound trip on the Coast Starlight, a gleaming Amtrak sleeper, lasts about 35 hours. The train leaves Los Angeles in mid morning and delivers its passengers to Seattle late the next day. By contrast, “The Coast Starlight,” Keith Bunin’s play at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, fills just a fraction of that time. A gentle, rueful play, directed with a steady and sympathetic hand by Tyne Rafaeli, it settles down among six passengers sharing a single coach. Narrow, nimble, self-contained, the ride it offers is as smooth as it is wistful. Because Bunin (“The Credeaux Canvas,” “The Busy World Is Hushed”) knows that any trip involves leaving something or someone behind.The narrative engine of “The Coast Starlight” is powered by T.J. (a jittery, ingenuous Will Harrison). T.J.’s journey is the most urgent and his secret, which he reveals a few minutes in, weighs the heaviest. The other characters suffer less insistent goads. Jane (Camila Canó-Flaviá) is going to visit her boyfriend, Noah (Rhys Coiro) to check in on his mother. Liz (Mia Barron, in a brazen, audacious performance that earns midshow applause) has fled a couples’ retreat. Ed (Jon Norman Schneider) is en route to his next meeting. Anna (Michelle Wilson) is returning to her family after performing a final obligation for her brother. They are strangers when they enter and strangers when they leave. Much of the play is written in the past conditional — “If I had told you,” “If I had known” — illuminating Bunin’s interest in the care that might have been tendered, the humanity that might have been shown if only the characters had been brave and vulnerable enough to reveal themselves to one another.The play moves between realism and symbolism as easily — depending on the quality of some train tracks, more easily — than a passenger might walk from one carriage to another, though the focus remains on the interior. It is largely a memory play (somewhat in the mode of Tennessee Williams or Brian Friel), so the characters frequently slip free of sequential time to comment on what they might have said and done and been. Sometimes they speak directly to the audience, at other times to imagined versions of each other, at other times in ordinary dialogue, though even these sequences have a delicate, dreamlike quality.The actors, half of whom have been with the play since its La Jolla Playhouse debut in 2019, assume their characters fluently and with deep feeling. The distinct energies and voices merge together, forming a finely calibrated ensemble. And Arnulfo Maldonado’s set, both practical and suggestive of the expanse of the Pacific beyond the train’s windows, Lap Chi Chu’s lighting and Daniel Kluger’s sound also work in concert, giving the impression of movement even when Rafaeli is wise enough to let the performers stay still.Not that they stay still for long. These are people with fidgety legs and restless hearts, most of whom are trying to figure out how they got here in the first place and where they might go next. At one point, T.J. voices an ambition that the characters share: “There’s got to be a better way to love people. A way that isn’t either a trick or a lie.”“The Coast Starlight” shows that kind of love, too. Even as Bunin deals in hypotheticals and relational failures, he also shows these people really, actually caring for each other. Liz pays for a round of drinks. Anna offers T.J. her sleeping car. T.J. talks a drunken Ed down. Jane gives T.J. a drawing. Yes, the play often strikes a melancholy tone, but its wheels also send up sparks of generosity and in Liz’s monologue, sharp humor. So let it do what any train should, which is to move you.The Coast StarlightThrough April 16 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More