| . | 04/23/2009
Joe Turner's Come and Gone
By: Eugene Paul
Chad L. Coleman (left) and Roger Robinson are part of a wonderful cast in the revival of August Wilson's play.
August Wilson’s second play, set in 1911 Pittsburgh, in a soaring, beautiful production directed by Bartlett Sher. Theatrical magic for which actors as well as audience need feel grateful. August Wilson can only be happy for them and for himself.
August Wilson’s death has had a transforming effect on the approaches and colorations surrounding the ways his plays are seen and mounted. Joe Turner is a vivid example. Wilson’s signature in his ten plays chronicling the history of the experience of descendents of black slaves in America has been his uncanny ear for the shadings in the language his characters fling at one another or use to caress each other, flay each other, console each other, love each other. All of his past directors followed his lead in setting his plays realistically, naturalistically, even though the song of his words carried spirits and hauntings. Director Bartlett Sher knows better; he is attuned singularly to Wilson’s poetics and his production of Joe Turner Has Come and Gone soars, linked to Wilson’s vision from start to very end, marked at the beginning by troubled Herald Loomis and his young daughter striding silhouetted against a luminescent, smog strewn Pittsburgh sky.
Loomis has been walking the unyielding earth for years seeking his wife. He had been trapped in forced servitude for seven years by the eponymous Joe Turner. Afterward, he had earned his bread as a wandering, visionary preacher, searching, searching. He and his little girl have come to this boarding house run by Seth and Bertha Holly, its proprietors. From here he will go out daily to search for his wife. The Hollys have other boarders from different parts of the hurting South, different behaviors, different speech, all black. Selig, the peddler, is the only white visitor. Most exotic of the boarders is Bynum, a “root worker”, a conjurer of spells and small magic bound in the roots he forages. Playwright Wilson has his characters engage in the transitioning behaviors running like fever through the society of 1911, full of hope and trust, yet suspicious, superstitious, devout, but devoutly believing in conjure magic.
Joe Turner is the next to earliest of Wilson’s ten plays, which are set roughly at ten year intervals through the twentieth century, created as much out of imagination as observation and, like almost all his plays, long, word soaked, his theater craft awkward, obvious, in transition. Later, when he knew what he was doing more readily than in his early trial and error days, his stories became more logical, more under his cerebral controls, his characters drawn from life.
Joe Turner is much more his creation throughout, set in a time he never actually knew. Blacks were still in their slavery roots, forced closer to each other by freedom they could only experience among their segregated situations. There was far more bitter than sweet, which made the sweet equally sharp. Wilson spun it all. And never more clearly than in this production as directed by Bartlett Sher.
Sher’s underscoring of the poetry in the vision as well as the words lends legitimacy to ways of speaking, ways of believing, even ways of performance. By today’s times, most African American actors have become so acclimated to cosmopolitan American speech they resort to adopting a “black” performance perception to act in what they believe was the speech and manner of blacks in former times. This kind of code, communicated to the audience, suggests such performances to be true representations. They are not. They are constructs. But Sher’s poetic direction gives them the license needed to accept these constructs as reality, a truly valuable addition to the presentation of Wilson’s work, especially Joe Turner. Herald Loomis’s ghostly visions become arrestingly vivid instead of oddities; eccentric Bynum’s conjures become acceptable behavior instead of absurd fakery. This is theatrical magic for which we all, actors as well as audience, need feel grateful. I especially liked the performances of Ernie Hudson, Arliss Howard and Roger Robinson.
Set designer Michael Yeargan understands Sher’s directorial concepts and fulfills them all lyrically in his practical witchcraft of a setting, real, yet unreal, there, yet not there, beautifully abetted by Brian MacDevitt’s apt, sensitive lighting. Catherine Zuber’s costumes are a bit much but we may need their extra nudges to get with the flow. And the music by Taj Mahal with the sound engineering of Scott Lehrer and Leon Rothenberg are necessary components of the entire success. To try to describe the centricity of the title of the play, derived from the song that haunts Loomis is to flatten and dull its effect. You have to experience what Sher and company have done with it. August Wilson can only be happy for them and for himself.
Belasco Theater, 111 West 44th Street. Tickets:$51.50-$96.50. Telecharge.com. Tue-Sat 8 pm. Mats, Wed, Sat 2 pm, Sun 3 pm.
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