Barter Theatre’s fall reading will be “Trains,” written by Quinton Cockrell and presented by Black Stories Black Voices on Oct. 1 at 7 p.m. at Barter’s Smith Theatre. Admission is free.
The play, penned by a graduate of Birmingham-Southern College and The Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Professional Actor Training Program, takes the audience back to Oct. 31, 1919, when the white residents of Corbin, Kentucky, forcibly removed around 200 African Americans from town. The victims were forced into box cars and sent to Knoxville, Tennessee. Corbin was left a virtually all-white town. Years later, Travis Hampton, a survivor of the purge, is leading a desperate, impoverished life with his family in Knoxville. When a white man, an old acquaintance from Corbin, approaches and attempts to “make things right,” Travis must come to terms with his past and his principles.
In 2021, Cockrell’s play City Limits was selected for the Barter Theatre’s New Play Festival’s Black in Appalachia Initiative. He is a seven-time recipient of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Meritorious Achievement Award for Excellence in Directing.
Trains is the very first full-length play to be developed through the Black Stories Black Voices program! It started as a monologue for Shine: Illuminating Black Stories (2022) and grew into a scene in Shine (2023).
