Trestle at Pope Lick Creek

by Naomi Wallace

Dalton Chance is 15 years old and an open book. Pace Creagan, aged 17, is fearless and feared, and to Dalton, she's irresistible. A poetic, Depression-era play by a prize-winning writer; a coming-of-age story with a wicked twist that reaches into the depths of a nation and asks what lies beneath.

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama

96 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2000

About the author

Naomi Wallace is an American playwright, screenwriter and poet from Kentucky. She is widely known for her plays, and has received several distinguished awards for her work.

Her Finborough Theatre productions include And I And Silence, which subsequently transferred to Signature Theater, New York City. Other theatre productions include In the Heart of America (Bush Theatre), Slaughter City (Royal Shakespeare Company), One Flea Spare (Public Theater, New York City), The Trestle at Pope Lick Creekand Things of Dry Hours (New York Theatre Workshop), The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East (Public Theater, New York City), and Night is a Room (Signature Theater, New York City).

Naomi has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize twice, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, the Obie Award and the Horton Foote Award. She is also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts development grant. In 2013, Naomi received the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, and in 2015 an Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Her play One Flea Spare was recently incorporated into the permanent repertoire of the French National Theatre, La Comédie-Française. Only two American playwrights have been added to La Comédie’s repertoire in two hundred years, the other being Tennessee Williams.

Reviews

[andrea hartmann]

The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek by Naomi Wallace is a complicated, horrific play set in the 1930s followed by a train-obsessed daredevil named Pace and a cautious, ambitious boy named Dalton. Right from the start, Pace influences Dalton in many different ways. She dares him to run a trestle at Pope Lick Creek (roll credits), an extremely dangerous stunt that has hurt many. She also entices him into engaging in sexual activities. Both of these factors contribute to the downfall of both characters (the word 'downfall' has various meanings in this case).

Two themes of this play include intimacy and hopelessness. First of all, each of the five characters displays their forms of intimacy, whether romantic, platonic, familial, etc. Many experience abuse in various ways, though the way its carried out is slightly inappropriate and fruitless. Both the themes of despair and intimacy provide some food for thought in the first act, and then any sense of development for these themes is wholly abandoned and left to the dust in the first act...

which leads me to my most important thoughts. The first act had a lot of promise. As I read with my acting class, we speculated about possible endings and plot twists. Then, it ended up being that our speculations were twenty times more interesting than what really happened. The second act completely fell off the railroad in the sense that character arcs were abandoned, the storyline itself was hastily and lazily closed, and many different scenes, actions, or character choices had no sort of motivation behind them. Unfortunately, while I would have given the first act four stars for its mysterious plot development and insinuation, I would give the second act one star for its incoherence and abstractions.

Without spoiling the show, I think I need to warn of the graphic sex scene that provides no bearing to the show, and simply makes many people very uncomfortable, especially considering the location of the scene within the show.

[Derek Neveu]

There were things I liked about this play and things I didn’t. The thing I disliked the most was the uneven balance between the two acts. Act One was filled with metaphoric ideas, engaging characters, nebulous intrigue, and had a lot of promise. Meanwhile, Act Two had some of that, but the ambiguous storytelling, meandering phasing in and out of the past and present, and the convoluted and cryptic ending took what started off as a 4/5 star read, and sadly ended it as a 3 star experience.

The backdrop of a Depression impacted small town community whose citizens struggle to come to terms with and fail to overcome the suffocating and defeating paralysis that comes with the territory is visceral and unfortunately relatable to many small town experiences today. The usage of locomotion and trestles to highlight the unfulfilled promise of a transitory life is well constructed, but I wish the confusing and ambiguously fraught relationship between Pace and Dalton was more developed and clear.

I liked elements, others I felt could have been better, but overall I at least appreciate what Wallace was trying to do. The small town boy in me couldn’t help but to resonate with some elements of this tragic play, and in the end, I am thankful that the road that lead out of my small town was more traversable and I was fortunate to make it out before the locomotive of oppressive reality stopped me dead in my tracks.

[vilma]

I read this while searching for good monologues and actually ended up quite enjoying the whole of this play. It was intense, odd at times and the overall mood was gloomy but I had a good time reading and would read through again.

[aimee!]

Read this for school but I still read it so I'm logging it on Goodreads.

Respectfully, what the hell was that

[Salvatore]

Eerie, creepy, and complex in all the right ways.

[Steve]

Good luck, I don't know how you're going to pull this off.

[Thomas]

It was fun playing the mentally fractured prison guard!

[Kaitlyn]

What in the world did I just read

[arden]

apparently people don’t like this play?? wdym!? it has trains!! that’s so cool!!

[Jack Maxwell]

Nice book

[Hannah F]

Underrated MASTERPIECE

[Madeline]

wow i loved this, such personal writing in such different situations. shoutout my acting teacher who thinks my vibe is 1930's orphan playing on train tracks

[Kerri]

loved this play.. and here is why - (beside the fact that it says "pope lick" ...

PACE: It wasn't just you and me
DALTON: It was something more. Like at school. At school they teach you. To speak. They say its math,
PACE: history,
DALTON: geometry, whatever. But they're teaching you to speak. Not about the world but about things. Just things: a door, a map,
PACE: a cup. Just the name of it.
DALTON: Not what a cup means, who picked it up, who drank from it,
PACE: who didn't and why;
DALTON: where a map came from, who fixed in the rivers, who'll take the wrong turn; or a door. Who cut the wood and who hung it there? Why that width, height? And who made that decision? Who agreed to it? Who didn't?
PACE: And what happened to them because of it?
DALTON: They just teach us to speak the things. So that's what we speak. But there's no past that way.
PACE & DALTON: And no future
DALTON: Cause after you've said the thing, you move on. You don't look back. You never think to cross it, never stop and turn.

AND THEN, the saddest thing i think i have ever read...
when i read this i felt like a potato.

PACE: Things. People. I've been watching. Tomorrow. Today. For years. And this is how things are. You and me and the rest of us kids out here, we're just like. Okay. Like potatoes left in a box. You ever seen a potato that's been left in a box? The potato thinks the dark is the dirt and it starts to grow roots so it can survive, but the dark isn't the dirt and all it ends up sucking on is a fistful of air. And then it dies.
DALTON: I'm not a potato.
PACE: Yes you are.

This play is all shadows... the allegory of the cave style.. standing at the bottom of a dusty ravine and always always looking up. so saaad. desperate.
i loved every hurty sad suffocating second of it.

[Mary]

What I like about this play is its overarching exploration of hopelessness, angst, and repressed emotions. What happens to people who are not able to fully express themselves? What happens to people who lose their identities? Wallace does a great job of pursuing the answers to those questions through the lives of her characters.

I also love the connection to American history. The play is clearly set in the 1930s and refers to the WPA and the lack of work available. Wallace connects this unemployment to identity, how lost and confused people feel when they don't have work or when they don't have work that's fulfilling. Then she goes further to connect that identity to love and pain. Dalton has a line that I found so powerful: "My country loves me. That's why it's killing me." This line only becomes more poignant once you realize how exactly this script plays out.

I read a few reviews of this play where the authors said they knew what was going to happen from the beginning. I did not. I think I figured it out close to the end. Perhaps seeing the play performed adds some vital information, but I was in suspense for most of the play, and I liked it that way!

[Toni Rae]

I read this because my theatre company is considering the script as a future production. While I am on the fence that we should do it (it's a company mission thing), I enjoyed it immensely. Wallace's attention to those "with no future" manages to hold them in an honorable light and reveal an intimate look at their fears and challenges of every day living. Each character is meaty and interesting; actors cast in this show have a lot to work with --and work through. It would be an unforgettable experience to be involved in a production of Trestle at Pope Lock Creek, whether you are in the cast, designing the show, or in the audience.

[Kaysy Ostrom]

Absolutely breathtaking. Definitely my new favorite play. One day I'd love to play the mom, Gin. Although I wish I were the right "type" to play Pace. Definitely worth a read - it's haunting, poetic, and tragic but worth the ride. I think people who don't normally read plays would love it as well.
I wish I could write a play like this for my playwriting class! But, alas, I need a lot of practice before I get to this place...

[lily ewald]

scene study reading week 5: holy fucking shit i loved this. read in one sitting and had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. my scene study teacher said you will either love this one or absolutely hate it, and boy was she right. wish it was longer and i NEED TO SEE A VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF THIS, READING IT IS SIMPLY NOT ENOUGH.

[Hagar]

It touched me the most...

[Libraryangel]

Such an odd but captivating coming of age story: "You won't take anything from me that I don't want to give you, Dalton. And that's a fact."

[Alyse]

excellent for young adult characters. Very moving/complex story