August Wilson’s JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE to be Presented at A Noise Within

“I On the heels of A Noise Within productions of Gem of the Ocean, Seven Guitars, Radio Golf, King Hedley II and The Piano Lesson, director Gregg T. Daniel will return to direct August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: the second play in Wilson’s extraordinary 10-play “American Century Cycle” and the sixth in A Noise Within’s commitment to stage them all. Performances begin October 18 and continue at the company’s Pasadena home through November 9.

Set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911 during the Great Migration, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone introduces us to a group of men and women teetering on the brink as they search for lost family, identity and purpose in the aftermath of slavery. Owners Seth Holly (Alex Morris) and his wife, Bertha (Veralyn Jones) play host to a makeshift family, as residents come and go during a time when descendants of former slaves were moving North in large numbers. When tormented Herald Loomis (Kai A. Ealy) arrives with his young daughter, Zonia (Jessica Williams), he is a free man after seven years’ hard labor on Joe Turner’s chain gang. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind (Tori Danner), believing she can help him reclaim his identity. But through his encounters with the rootmaker, Bynum (Gerald C. Rivers), and the other residents (Brandon Gill, Briana James, Nija Okoro), he comes to realize that what he really needs is to “find his song” — and it will take more than the local people finder (Bert Emmett) to discover it. Also in the cast is Jared Bennett as the neighbor boy, Reuben.

“Seth and Bertha’s boarding house is a way station where souls come on their way to find redemption,” explains Daniel. “Thousands of former slaves and their descendants moved from the South into the jungles of the northern cities after the end of the Civil War. They needed to find each other, to reconnect with their heritage, their ancestry and their culture.

As in all of Wilson’s plays, a recurring motif in Joe Turner is the complex relationship between Christianity and African mysticism.

Taken as a whole, the ten plays in Wilson’s monumental cycle span a period of 90 years, from Gem of the Ocean in 1904 to Radio Golf in 1997 — with nine of them set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where Wilson himself grew up. But the plays were not written sequentially and are not connected in the manner of a serial story. Each play stands alone.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the second in the cycle chronologically, premiered in 1986 at Yale Rep, opening on Broadway in 1988 and running concurrently with Fences (the sixth play chronologically), which had opened on Broadway the year prior. The original Working Title was Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket, the name of a collage painting by Romare Bearden The title Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a line from an early blues song, “Joe Turner’s Blues,” about the post-Civil war convict leasing system, a form of neo-slavery that sentenced Black males who ran afoul of the law to seven years of hard labor on chain gangs, profiting from their labors.