Alexis
Soloski

July 30, 2015

“Ramona,” a play from Georgia’s Gabriadze Theater at the Lincoln Center Festival, stars two star-crossed steam locomotives. You could say it’s about the romance of travel, though here that romance ends in an unusually tearful scene of smelting. In just over an hour, this puppet show, set in the postwar Soviet Union, tackles freedom and duty, love and death, and metallurgy. The winsome Ramona is a shunting engine, relegated to tootling up and down a small railroad station in the Rioni region. Her lover is Ermon, a strapping hunk of horsepower. When he is sent to help rebuild infrastructure in Siberia, Ramona pines away for months and then years. But she regains a sense of purpose when a couple of dodgy circus impresarios persuade her to carry their troupe over the mountain pass to the spa town of Tskaltubo to rescue their circus tent and their livelihood. Then their star tightrope walker is injured, and these mountebanks demand from Ramona a further, aerodynamically unlikely sacrifice.