When you hear the term “solo show,” you might assume autobiography, and a specific breed thereof: a confessional processing of trauma that blames parents, seeks redemption and enlists the audience on its side to compensate for feeling alone earlier in life.

You can tell Wayne Harris’ “Train Stories” isn’t going to be that kind of piece from its opening, when a projection reads “San Antonio, Texas, 1948,” and a triad of characters, all Black career railroad men, start throwing down in a wide-open, old-time argot: “a laugh as big as a dream,” a mountain “as hard as hurt feelings.” Drawing on the transformative power of fiction, it suggests just how often the rest of the theater world boxes in the art form that is the solo show, how much imaginative potential remains untapped.

但与2003年的版本,“Storie训练s” is also no longer a solo show — to its detriment.

Back then, Harris performed all three characters: A porch-sitting Elder Brown, a retired caller, i.e., the worker whose voice and song kept the hammer-wielding men in rhythm, punctuates almost every line with a hooting chuckle. The punctilious dining car porter John Henry, who’s susceptible to romanticizing, disdaining and getting scammed, claims familial ties to the steel-driving legend. Pimp and regular passenger Tyrone Little travels up and down the line to “maintain his product in the most efficient and profitable way.”

Twenty years later, while Harris still plays Elder Brown, he’s joined by Kirk Waller as John Henry and Tony Cyprien as Tyrone Little. The newcomers can be unsteady, as if they’re still finding their footing on a bumpy train instead of charging it from the engine car toward the horizon.

But even if the execution were surer, the show still clearly wants to be a solo show. At any given moment, the two non-speaking actors are almost always just frozen on stage in silence. When Harris, who also directs, occasionally attempts to get two performers to interact, it’s with all the fluidity of a couple of mannequins turning a crank to face each other. You might find yourself hungering for the particular alchemy of solo shows, where part of the thrill is watching a single artist morph from character to character, beat to beat, summoning a whole little universe with a turn of the jaw, a scrunch of the brow.

Even so, Harris’ writing gleams. For all its imagery, it’s also matter-of-fact and not at all shackled by political correctness, instead letting its characters be men of their time without needing to virtue-signal that it doesn’t believe what they say. The three spout all manner of ugliness, especially about women, but they express themselves with virtuoso, and their hardness is clearly the product of a hard and racist world — one that’d literally bleach the color out of a man’s hands, one where every hope for a different life gets trampled and taunted.

As the seemingly separate stories start to ricochet off each other, then intersect, then plait into one, Harris achieves yet another solo show rarity: genuine suspense driven by a carefully paced plot, vividly constructed characters and slant perspectives. He seeds horror and tends to it; its vine creeps through your veins long before it blossoms.

Part tall tale, part elegy and part ghost story, “Train Stories” laments a world where a promising young Black girl never had a chance, where the work songs the train caller bellows out can’t ferry anyone to a better life. And yet, as with the best of tragedies, the beauty of its expression offers a counterbalance to despair; any world that could produce such a piece can’t be entirely hopeless.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com