'The Sunset Limited': Wrestling with hope and nothing
It runs through Sept. 27 at The Arts Factory, 1545 W. Trade St., at Johnson C. Smith University
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on Sept. 12, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
Content warning: The following review contains references to suicide and depression, which may be distressing to some audiences.
Review: Carolina Actors Studio Theatre’s revival of ‘The Sunset Limited’ pits faith against despair in a powerful, immersive staging
“The Sunset Limited” follows an ex-convict who found faith and a disillusioned intellectual clash over belief, nihilism and the possibility of salvation after a life-saving encounter on a New York subway platform. (Photo courtesy of Carolina Actors Studio Theatre)
by Lawrence Toppman
The most poignant thing about Carolina Actors Studio Theatre’s production of “The Sunset Limited” may be the program note. In the early ’10s, veteran CAST performer John Cunningham suggested the company produce Cormac McCarthy’s eloquent one-act about suicide. CAST soon went out of business, staying dark for 11 years before coming back this spring. In the interim, Cunningham took his own life.
McCarthy published this play in 2006 at the age of 73. So it’s tempting to associate him with White (Thom Tonetti), a world-weary older guy who has just attempted to leap in front of a moving train. He’s been snatched from death by Black (Zach Humphrey), who has brought the man he calls “The Professor” back to his tenement apartment for a long conversation. (Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson took these roles in a 2011 adaptation for television.)
But McCarthy’s too canny to load any dramatic dice. At first, Black’s shrewdly optimistic talk about God’s love seems more persuasive than White’s evasive answers to his arguments. In the end, in one long monologue about the meaninglessness of existence, White articulates the causes of the depression into which he has settled: Neither medicine nor counseling nor philosophy gives him any reason to go on.
Each man holds onto a profound hope. Black hopes that, if God supplies the right words, he can help a fellow soul find happiness. Replies White, “I cling to the hope of nothingness.” For him, suicide is both an escape to oblivion and a renunciation of a world where “Western civilization went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau.” (McCarthy was finishing middle school when Americans first saw photos of Nazi death camp atrocities.)
The play’s whimsical moments reminded me of “The Angel Levine,” in which a Black angel visits an elderly white Jewish tailor in a rundown New York apartment. The point of Bernard Malamud’s story is that miracles become possible only if we believe they could be. But Black insists he’s not otherworldly, and unlike the tailor, White hasn’t had any faith to lose. He relies on rationality, and his mind tells him, “Suffering and human destiny are the same thing.”
CAST producer Michael Simmons and director Dee Abdullah believe in “experiential theater,” in which the atmosphere of a show surrounds you all through the building — and, in this case, outside, where a presumably unhoused person waited for patrons at the front door of The Arts Factory on West Trade Street. More of them walked the halls inside, selling food, spurious watches and suspect DVDs. (I wonder what the prices would have been on the last two items. I braved no more than a bottle of water, though we learned after the show that all money collected went to Charlotte Rescue Mission.)
Patrons were given an apartment key, then metaphorically locked into a slum unit with stained cabinets, aged kitchen equipment and a spooky picture of The Last Supper on a cracked wall. (Simmons designed the set and the aural background that reinforced the urban mood.)
McCarthy could have edited 15 minutes from this script without losing anything of importance. And we learn far more about Black, assuming he’s telling the truth about his past, than about the tight-lipped White. Black shares anecdotes about time in prison and recovery from alcoholism — something he and McCarthy had in common — but we never learn much about White, including what (if anything) he’s a professor of.
That and Humphrey’s immensely charismatic performance tip our sympathies toward Black most of the way. But Tonetti gets a chance to shine in the impassioned monologue near the end that balances the narrative. We realize we’ve been watching Jacob wrestling with the angel, but a Jacob who seeks death instead of a blessing and an angel who weeps to see God denied.
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If You’re Going
“The Sunset Limited” runs through Sept. 27 at The Arts Factory, 1545 W. Trade St. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, with talkbacks after the Sunday performances.
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Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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