When the lights come up on the Pittsburgh boarding-house that is the setting for Joe Turner's Come and Gone, the first thing that strikes you is the beauty of it — the way director Bartlett Sher paints stage pictures that linger in your mind. There's a wide expanse of stage, nearly bare; a row of mismatched wooden chairs; and a wider expanse of sky, glowing with an extraordinary light.
This is all so beautiful, you think — and then for the next nearly three hours you don't think about staging at all because you're so swept up in the power of August Wilson's story.
Joe Turner is the second of Wilson's 10-play cycle of dramas that tell the stories of African-Americans in the 20th century: In this one, set in Pittsburgh in 1911, a set of strangers come together in the Pittsburgh boarding-house, all of them refugees from oppression and all of them trying to find their way in a new world. Most of them are black people who have headed north to look for freedom; many are also looking for each other — for missing men, missing children, even idealized lovers who they think will quench their loneliness and set them free.
In its first Broadway outing, in 1988, Joe Turner lasted only about three months. This highly acclaimed version, which is a limited run, won't last any longer (it's set to close June 16). It's a shame because Wilson, as always, tells a story that needs to be told.
These are classic Wilson characters — the boarding-house owner, Seth Holly (Ernie Hudson), who makes pots and pans on the side, and who says if he only had the right tools he could really make it big; the haunted wanderer, Herald Loomis (Chad L. Coleman), who is searching for the wife he was stolen from more than a decade before; the old-time conjure-man, Bynum Walker (Roger Robinson), who counsels that everyone needs to find his or her own song.
Loomis says he's looking for his "starting place," a place in the world he can fit in. But Bynum says that Loomis has forgotten his own song.
"When a man forgets his song, he goes out in search of it until he finds he's got it with him all the time," Bynum says.
There are other archetypal Wilson characters, too — the loose woman Molly Cunnigham (Aunjanue Ellis), the quiet, loving Mattie Campbell (Marsha Stephanie Blake); the wet-behind-the-ears guitar player Jeremy Furlow (Andre Holland) and more. And there's the sole white character, Rutherford Selig (Arliss Howard), a so-called finder of people whose ancestors brought slaves to this country and sold them back and forth. He's finding people, Seth's wife Bertha points out, that Selig actually took away in the first place.
It's hard to overstate the majesty of Wilson's storytelling: You feel you're witness not only to these particular people but to a whole nation of people on the move, lost people, people in transition.
And it's hard to overstate the lyricism of his writing and, when it's needed most, its elegant simplicity: "'All you need in the world is love and laughter," says Bertha (LaTanya Richardson Jackson). "That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other."
I don't know of a playwright who knows people better than that.
(Photos: Top: LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Ernie Hudson, Andre Holland and Roger Robinson. Middle: Chad L. Coleman and Roger Robinson. Bottom: Roger Robinson. Photos by T. Charles Erickson.