Review: Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Amari Rose Leigh, foreground, Chad L. Coleman and Danai Gurira

A Song of Relationships Found and Lost

By Lauren Yarger
Bartlett Sher expertly directs a strong ensemble cast in a richly compelling revival of August Wilson’s tale of relationships found and lost in Lincoln Center Theater's Joe Turner’s Come and Gone playing at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre.

The second in Wilson’s 10-cyle decade-by-decade chronicle of the journey of African Americans through the 20th century, Joe Turner’s strengths come in the development of it characters and in the skilled acting that brings them to life. Set in the 1911 Pittsburgh boarding house run by Seth Holly (Ernie Hudson) and his wife Bertha (Latanya Richardson Jackson), the play is a glimpse into two weeks in the lives of people still trying to find their way in the years following emancipation.

Herald Loomis (Chad L. Coleman), a mysterious wanderer looking for his wife, arrives with his daughter Zonia (Amari Rose Leigh). Jeremy Furlow (Andre Holland) offers to take up with Mattie Campbell (Marsh Stephanie Blake) who has been abandoned by her man, until Molly Cunningham (Aunjanue Ellis), a more interesting conquest arrives at the boarding house.

There’s also Bynum Walker (Roger Robinson) a Hoodoo practitioner, who sacrifices pigeons, casts spells using roots and has the gift of “binding” people to one another. He enlists the services of white peddler Rutherford Selig (Arliss Howard) to help him find a “shiny man” who once shared with him the secret of life. Loomis also asks Selig to use his “people finding” skills to help him locate his wife Martha (Danai Gurira), from whom he was separated when a man named Joe Turner forced him into seven years of servitude in Memphis.

Interspersed in the slice of life are some visions (Loomis sees people made of bones walking on water), some Zuba, an African dance ritual that ends in a Pentecostal-like religious experience and Loomis denouncing his ties with Jesus and the church and cutting his chest in an act of independence, when he finally learns how to "sing his song." Some of these experiences are rather confusing and seem to come from nowhere and leave audience members questioning each other at intermission and after the show.

Also confusing and distracting are Michael Yeargan’s mobile set pieces. Tables, windows, doors, etc. suddenly move onto or off the stage in the middle of scenes when there seems to be no need. Later, when the family is gathered, the dining room table suddenly is missing, again with no apparent reason why. The rest of the design team (Catherine Zuber, costumes; Brain MacDevitt, lighting; Scott Lehrer and Leone Rotherberg, sound) delivers and original music from Taj Mahal combines to create an atmosphere of reality countered by the mystical.

The real treasure is in the characters, whether sharing complicated relationships or the sweet joy of a first kiss (Michael Cummings plays the young neighbor who becomes Zonia’s boyfriend). We feel like we’ve been able to peer into the window of the boarding house and understand better what it was like to be one of the boarders there.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone plays through June 14 at the Belasco Theatre, 111 West 44th Street, NY. Tickets are available by calling (212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7250 or by visiting http://www.lct.org/.

Christians might also like to know:

• Sex Outside of Marriage
• Hoodo (African based religion where luck and love are conjured)