August Wilson, one of America's outstanding playwrights, has boldly moved into new creative areas in his latest work, Joe Turner's Come and Gone. This play continues Wilson's exploration of the quest for black-American identity. Joe Turner carries forward with unexpected force what will eventually form a play cycle dramatically encompassing the history of black America through the twentieth century.
Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, set in the 1920s, deals with the exploitation of black musicians. Fences, set in the 1950s, examines the simmering tensions that boiled over in the 1960s. His upcoming play, The Piano Lesson, is set in the 1930s, while two earlier plays cover the 1940s and 1970s.
Wilson's focus on history springs from his concern for identity. How can you know who you are and where you should go if you do not know where you came from? In Ma Rainey and Fences, Wilson examined the paths leading into the dominant culture represented by music and sport, respectively, and rejected them as inadequate.
A New Direction
Joe Turner searches in a new direction. Set in 1911 in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse, the play reaches further back in time. The quest here turns inward, into the black community and, ultimately, into the soul - looking back to Africa from a sustaining tradition.
The large-scale migration and accompanying dislocation of blacks from the rural South to northern industrial cities, just developing at the time, form the social setting of the play. The spiritual disruption provoked by the migration and, beyond that, by the legacy of slavery, forms its theme.
Wilson opens Joe Turner in the sharply observed naturalistic style of his earlier works. In the course of the play, however, he shifts drastically and dramatically into a symbolic mode, pregnant with barely controlled spiritual forces and ultimately reminiscent of Greek tragedy.
Seth Holly (Mel Winkler), who with his wife, Bertha, runs the boardinghouse, feels established in the North. He has inherited the boardinghouse from his father and professes a "seen-it-all" skepticism about the new arrivals from the South, with their Bibles and guitars, and their dreams. His house provides these people with a sense of warmth and security. Seth is responsible and hardworking, his marriage stable and his wife a steady, maternal presence throughout.
Rhythm of Poetry
For guests and visitors there are always hot food and good-natured banter. The language is rich with the rhythms of poetry, which is what Wilson wrote first, and the lively humor of street-talk, which he absorbed as a young man growing up in Pittsburgh's Hill district.
Boarding at the house are Jeremy, a young man working as a day laborer who has a hot hand on the blues guitar and a cool eye for the ladies, and Bynum Walker. Bynum (Ed hall) is an herbalist and a dispenser of charms - charms whose origins lie in the African past. Seth regards his magic as nonsense, and although other characters call him spooky, the early
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