Credible Journey
One week before hitching a ride with Book of Travelers at Playwrights Horizons, I boarded The Pennsylvanian en route to Pittsburgh. The trip from Philadelphia stretched more than seven hours — a bit longer than Amtrak had promised, though as Gabriel Kahane reminds us in his show, this is only to be expected, and possibly appreciated. I wasn’t exactly a stranger on a train; several dozen of us had booked passage to a jazz festival, forming an ad hoc but authentic community in motion. Still, Kahane was somewhere in my thoughts as I made small talk several miles past Altoona, peering out a window at the World Famous Horseshoe Curve.
As he good-naturedly explains from the stage, Kahane set out on his cross-country adventure the day after the 2016 presidential election, in pursuit of some reorienting perspective. He covered nearly 9,000 miles of track over a couple of weeks, along an oblong route that I’m sure my daughters and I have unwittingly recreated in the board game Ticket to Ride: New York to Chicago to Portland to Los Angeles to Chicago to New Orleans to New York. Book of Travelers, the 2018 album that Kahane made of this experience, is a delicate and haunting work rooted in the specific drift of his human encounters; it’s also, as Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker, “a song cycle of unwavering seriousness, delivering snapshots of a broken and desperate nation.”
Kahane outlines this political resonance with a deft hand, trusting his audience to fill in the rest. Leading up to that election, he says, he’d been among the Very Online, espousing virtuous truths (and excoriating cynical untruths) on a particular social media platform. (I was there too.) He recalls the self-righteous and ironclad certainty he felt at the time. “That certainty drifted into hubris, which drifted into contempt,” he admits. “And I didn’t like who I was becoming.”
This is a relatable epiphany — even more so now, in the run-up to another election marked by some of the same dynamics, even one of the same candidates — and yet the Whitmanian extremity of Kahane’s project remains incomprehensible for most of us. To embark with so few of the tethering comforts that define modern life, compelling oneself into so many tentative interactions across a dining-car table. To listen, and divulge. To listen, and not judge. What Book of Travelers accomplishes as a “solo musical play,” under the subtle direction of Annie Tippe, is a rendering of this incredible journey in warmly credible terms. Kahane, at home on a set that speaks of parlor fascinations, opens deeper insights on the stories in his songs. The characters grow vivid and tactile — not least the perceptive, pliable character at the center of it all.
Another character who traveled this country in search of insights, the French nobleman and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, came away convinced that the key promise in the American experiment was the “equality of conditions.” Not quite two centuries later, Kahane brings us “What If I Told You,” the story of a prosperous, Ivy League-educated Black woman who’s chosen train travel out of fear for her safety on the road in the Deep South — “‘Cause they don't need a hood or a cross or a tree,” she says, in his understated voice. Elsewhere Kahane sings of household accidents and their heavy toll (“Model Trains”), of reluctant, haunted homecomings (“Baltimore”), of the rituals to ward off despair (“Friends of Friends of Bill”).
And he sings and speaks movingly about his grandmother, whose own American expedition came about after she fled Nazi Germany; her weathered diary provides lyrics and a historical lifeline (“October 1, 1939”). In a linked song about her immigrant story (“Port of Hamburg”), Kahane bemoans history “drowning in the false, fat present tense.” (You must forgive a listener who briefly mishears the terminus of this line as “false, fat president.”) Here and throughout Book of Travelers, the vocal melody, harmonic progression, and rhythmic energy create a pull that carries Kahane’s narrative like a tidal current in an estuary. He isn’t too interested in evoking locomotive sound, as Duke Ellington did so effectively in a more railbound age. But in some of his strobing cadence at the piano, and especially in the light polyrhythmic tumble of “Baedeker,” I hear something like the muffled beat one experiences on the modern line.
My trip aboard the Pennsylvanian is recent enough that I can recall that rhythm as a sense memory. I’m also reminded of the moment, somewhere past Harrisburg, when I walked the length of four cars toward the cafe and took note of several Amish families, whose presence has a parallel in Book of Travelers. “Singing with a Stranger” — the closing song on the album, and the opening song in the show — recurs later on with a modified piano orchestration, after Kahane has drawn some context. It’s about his experience singing hymns with half a dozen Old Order German Baptist Brethren, though the point of view in the song is crucially theirs. The stranger in the song is him. As Book of Travelers invites us to do, he is singing to better know this stranger, and to prove that this land still holds a harbor for his hopes and ideals.
