The image of the road wends all through August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” the most mysterious and, I think, most beautiful work in the playwright’s foundational catalog. The play takes place in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse, in 1911, but what seems to be a realistic way-station drama — history seen in glimpses as roomers come and go — also shades, at times, into myth. Who passes through, and who passes over? (A road carries more than the living.)
The show makes its own journey of return in Debbie Allen’s revival, which opened on Saturday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, nearly four decades after its Broadway premiere at the same theater, in 1988. This production doesn’t always travel smoothly — some of Allen’s staging elements war with one another. A few younger members of the ensemble, crucial to the play’s novelistic ebb and flow, are also still finding their footing. But Wilson’s language rushes past and over every barrier.
A decade into the 20th century, a scant two generations removed from slavery, the Great Migration draws Black southerners north, some heading to the mills and factories of Pittsburgh. There, a Hill District house — owned by the brusque Seth Holly (Cedric the Entertainer) and his kind wife, Bertha (Taraji P. Henson) — welcomes them. (A room costs two dollars a week; towels 25 cents; meals included.)
The wayfarers never stop thinking of motion or of parting: Characters in this play say the word “road” 48 times. One recent arrival from North Carolina, Jeremy (Tripp Taylor), has picked up work paving a new street, though he won’t finish building it before he lets it bear him away. Two women, nervous Mattie (Nimene Sierra Wureh) and cynical Molly (Maya Boyd), also drift in, much to Jeremy’s delight. Henson plays Bertha as her temporary flock’s shepherd; she gives Jeremy’s head a nice little thwack at dinner when she sees his eyes wandering.
Seth’s one longtime boarder, the old “conjure man” Bynum (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), has several gifts. His name comes from his talent for binding people to their “song,” his term for a person’s purpose, and to each other. In Bynum, the playwright also binds together metaphysical worlds, intertwining ancestral African root work with Christianity’s blood-sacrament. Bynum knows where the road goes: He talks about once following a “shiny man” into the realm of spirit, where he met with the dead. All Bynum wants is to find this man again — “shining like new money” — perhaps so he can cross the veil for good.
Bynum also hugely annoys practical-minded Seth, and their crotchety double-act gives the play its comic charge. Santiago-Hudson, a longtime Wilson expert (and Tony winner for “Seven Guitars”), provides their duet’s wry high-hat dazzle, but Cedric the Entertainer’s deadpan performance is the dry bass drum, so hilarious that I would have signed up for another hour. Seth loves to carp, tutting at the “foolish” migrants; at the deals he gets from the peddler Rutherford Selig (Bradley Stryker); at Jeremy’s musical ambitions. “That boy done carried a guitar all the way from North Carolina. What he gonna find out? What he gonna do with that guitar?” he complains to Bertha, delighted to be exasperated.
And then the burning-eyed Herald Loomis (Joshua Boone) knocks at the door. Allen has Boone appear first in silhouette, the sliding shadow of his flat-brimmed hat making him appear like a cowboy or, possibly, the devil. Herald, traveling with his 11-year-old daughter Zonia (I saw Savannah Commodore), has finally been released from a work-gang in Tennessee, and he is on the road, trying to find his wife, Martha.
Even when Herald seems to be losing his mind, chanting in tongues, Bynum sees both that Herald has prophecy in him — think about his name, after all — and that he has been deprived of more than a wife. And here Wilson tells us the story of the blues song that serves as the play’s title. The lyrics haunt Herald because they refer to his own abduction: Like the voice in the song, he too was snatched up by Joe Turner, the Tennessee governor’s demonic brother, on the barest pretext and forced onto a chain gang for seven years. (When Black men vanished, those left behind would say, Joe Turner’s come and gone.)
Allen keeps trying to find the show’s truth in music: She starts the play with Taylor’s Jeremy playing guitar; the first act ends in a climactic call-and-response juba, performed by nearly the whole cast. I wish these moments worked as well as the more intimate ones. It’s odd to me that Allen, who choreographed her first Broadway show in 1988, is least deft with a large number of people onstage.
Perhaps she’s already thinking in close-up? Henson told The Guardian that this production is, to a degree, a preparation for a potential movie version, part of a mission to film Wilson’s entire Century Cycle. (“The Piano Lesson” was revived on Broadway in 2022; the movie, with some of the same cast, came out in 2024.) And there is something of a vast soundstage about David Gallo’s set. He lines up all the house’s furniture and its front door against a black-and-white image of what looms over Seth Holly’s street — iron bridge, iron foundries, iron clouds. It’s also insistently dark, no matter the time of day.
Wilson’s Century Cycle can’t really be compared to any other playwright’s oeuvre: His nearly lifelong project was 10 plays, one written for each decade of the 20th century, set almost entirely in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Most of them are masterpieces. To compare him to another artist, you’d need to reach for Michelangelo or Proust or the cathedral builders, makers who composed on the scale of generations.
Every moment in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is now affected by the scope of this great project; a contemporary audience watches it aware that it’s a component in a larger statement about the country and Black life. The shiny man teaches Bynum to cleanse himself symbolically by washing his hands with blood; when Herald has a vision, he sees the bones of his ancestors, sinking down into the waters of the Middle Passage, and then washing over the land. For anyone who also knows Wilson’s great statement of intent, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” the language will be familiar. “Our blood is soaked into the soil,” he said, in that 1996 public address, summoning Black artists to a common purpose.
So whatever my quibbles, you must try to see “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” because this one play is the key to Wilson’s deep mystery, which is, in itself, the key to the American theater. And while there are a few unsteady performances, there’s also at least one triumphant, gravity-altering one, delivered right at the end of the play.
Herald’s missing wife, Martha, enters. She’s played by Abigail Onwunali, an actor we last saw as one of the Lears in “King Lear” at La MaMa; she is somehow more regal here. Martha has caught the evangelical spirit, and she goes toe-to-toe with her husband, trying to shout her way through his mounting ecstatic derangement. Onwunali’s passion kindles Boone’s, which, in turn, sparks a wail of sorrow from little Commodore, playing their daughter. The three-person family seems to spin around, drawn centripetally together but tearing centrifugally apart. Will their love, or the world’s violence be stronger? Will it be Jesus or the ancestors? Of course you’ll have to go, to find out for yourself. You just need to put one foot upon that road.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone Through July 26 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; joeturnerbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
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