Two Trains Running

Two Trains Running
Broadway production poster
Written by	August Wilson
Date premiered	1990
Place premiered	Yale Repertory Theatre New Haven, Connecticut
Original language	English
Series	The Pittsburgh Cycle
Subject	The uncertain future promised by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s
Genre	Drama
Setting	the Hill District of Pittsburgh, 1969

Two Trains Running is a play by American playwright August Wilson, the seventh in his ten-part series The Pittsburgh Cycle. The play premiered on Broadway in 1992 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Two Trains Running was first performed by the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut in March 1990. It was then performed at the Huntington Theatre (Boston, Massachusetts), the Seattle Repertory Theatre (Seattle, Washington), and the Old Globe Theatre, (San Diego, California).

The play premiered on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on April 13, 1992. The play closed on August 30, 1992 after 160 performances and 7 previews. Directed by Lloyd Richards, the cast featured Roscoe Lee Browne as Holloway, Anthony Chisholm as Wolf, Laurence Fishburne as Sterling, Leonard Parker as West and Cynthia Martells as Risa.

The play takes place in the Hill District, an African-American neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1969. It explores the social and psychological manifestations of changing attitudes toward race from the perspective of urban blacks.

Seeking to escape from poverty, racism, and segregatory "Jim Crow" laws, many black Americans migrated to northern industrial cities during the early and mid-20th century. Most of these migrants had worked in agriculture in the former Confederate slave states, and few were well acquainted with urban life. Broadly speaking, blacks who moved north could expect higher wages, better educational opportunities, and greater potential for social advancement than they had received in the South.