Train to Cleveland with John Ruskin
Set over the course of a return train journey in 1997, Train to Cleveland with John Ruskin, a new play by Dan Callaway, blends music, memory, humor, and unexpected cross-time encounters.
Burnt-out PhD student Michael Nolan is days away from defending his dissertation while trying to hold together a life constructed on endurance. His mother is about to lose her home. If he doesn’t complete his defense by the deadline, he’ll lose the job that provides the health insurance he desperately needs. And while he races to save everything else, the woman he loves wonders whether there’s any room left for her.
Then John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic, appears. What starts as an argument about art becomes a reckoning with illness, love, and whether beauty can still reach someone who’s spent a lifetime trying to earn his worth alone.
This intimate play with music explores ambition, caregiving, inherited patterns, and the frightening vulnerability of allowing yourself to be loved, supported, and changed.