Actors’ Playhouse’s thrilling theater version of The Girl on the Train has a history.
When Paula Hawkins’ novel The Girl on the Train was released in 2015, it became one of those rarified phenomenal best sellers, landing on myriad lists. Readers in many countries were lured to this story about a woman who obsessively rode a train, drinking herself numb with canned gin and tonics.
The Girl on the Train latched onto that trend of the unreliable narrator that had resurged with Gillian Flynn’s 2012 Gone Girl, and is still a device used in thrillers.
At the heart of the story was The Girl—Rachel Watson, hardly a girl at 33 years old. A complicated character, Rachel was both appealing and repulsive; sympathetic and pitiful. We may want to join her for a drink, but take away all her liquor; give her a hug and get her into therapy. You want to comfort her but also never see her again. You don’t believe a word she says, and yet you want to.
