NEW YORK — Most everyone is lost in August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” a phenomenal drama from the late American Shakespeare that’s set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Only some are looking to be found.
The great Bard of Pittsburgh wrote dramas about the African American experience in every decade of the last century, of course. This searing 1984 work, last seen on Broadway in 2009 and now revived at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre with a spectacular ensemble cast and refreshingly alive direction from Debbie Allen, is about the Great Migration moment when Black Americans were caught in the transition not just from North to South, but from property to personhood.
Slavery times still lingered in living memory.
So too did the titular Joe Turner, the brother of Tennessee Governor Pete Turner and a man responsible for taking prisoners from Memphis to Nashville, but who often sold them into a kind of neo-slavery on cotton plantations along the Mississippi River.
We’re in a Pittsburgh boarding house run by Seth Holly (Cedric the Entertainer) and his wife Bertha (Taraji P. Henson), a couple with a window into the displaced souls coming, going and renting his rooms even as he tries to keep order. Some, like Bynum Walker (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) have found a kind of calm around the Hollys’ table. Others, such as Maya Boyd’s Molly Cunningham and Nimene Sierra Wureh’s Mattie Campbell, are restless souls, looking for a safe haven as they climb Seth and Bertha’s stairs.
But Wilson is most interested in a brooding soul called Harold Loomis (Joshua Boone), who arrives at the boarding house telling people he has spent years looking for his lost wife and that without finding her, he has no hope of finding his center. Harold comes with a little girl, the child they share.
Is this a man who has done some kind of deal with the devil? Wilson at first implies that is possible, only to eventually make us see that nothing about who Harold is now was a consequence of his own choices.
Lots of people don’t realize how much stylistic variety Wilson baked into his 10 major plays, some of which are written in the mode of realism, others more akin to Greek tragedy. “Joe Turner” is his most notable foray into expressionism, a play that sees a cruel world mostly through the wandering Harold’s eyes. That’s why David Gallo’s setting, a vista of a fragile boarding house nearly consumed by the rising, sun-blotting, industrial landscape of Pittsburgh, works so effectively here.
Those attending multiple Broadway plays might be surprised to learn how much this play has in common with “Death of a Salesman.” Arthur Miller’s play is getting a much leaner revival with an eye on universals, but this staging of “Joe Turner” howls with specific circumstances.
Wilson wrote and, while he was alive, spoke often about how the Black family was ripped apart by chattel slavery, and how that foundational act of societal violence cascaded and compounded throughout Black life in the 20th century in America. You can see it in all of his plays, but none more so than in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” my second favorite of his 10 ten plays after “King Hedley II.”
Allen’s production starts gently, as does the play, and it honors the other side of Wilson, which is to write about how Blacks found spaces, even in 1911, for humor and community with each other. That’s manifest fabulously well here by Cedric and Santiago-Hudson. Boyd and Wureh, both digging deep, explore the fate of young women adrift in this landscape and relying on men for an anchor, a desired rooting that too often proved elusive.
But once the former slave-catcher-turned-Black-people-finder Rutherford (a creepy Bradley Stryker) does his reinvented job, the play, this production and Boone’s smoldering performance all merge with the very personal consequences of being freed only to be recaptured all over again, forced back into bondage as others moved on.
Harold, fated to wander like Odysseus or the mythological Wandering Jew, is a fictional creation, of course, like almost all of Wilson’s characters, but he has representative magnitude, just like Willy Loman.
What a treat to have both of these very different revivals opening on Broadway in a matter of days. One heck of a revelatory American double bill, if you can find the time one weekend.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St., New York; joeturnerbway.com
