Stage Review

ACCENT/L.A.—April-May, 1989

‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone’

By EDWARD J. BOYER

August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Los Angeles Theatre Center is a journey behind illusions to the reality of blood rituals, “bones people,” haints, conjurers and elusive shiny men.

It is a triumphant song in celebration of song — a healing blues calling its people home.

While it ostensibly takes place in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911, it is actually set in the black psyche—crippled and cut off from its African roots.

The play is an essay — no, a poem — on the black immigrant experience, a metaphor for the disaster awaiting a people who lose their memory.

Joe Turner is a historical character, the brother of a Tennessee governor, who abducted blacks after the Civil War and “sentenced” them to seven years’ hard labor on his chain gangs.

“Why he catch me?” Herald Loomis (James Craven) asks. “What he want. Must be something I got.”

Bynum Walker (Roscoe Lee Browne), a conjurer whose talents are eagerly sought, tells him:

“He wants your song. Every nigger he catch, he looking for that song. You still got it. You just forgot how to sing it.”

Loomis and Walker come together in the boarding house run by Seth and Bertha Holly (Steven Anthony Jones and Delores Mitchell), free-born northern blacks. Loomis arrives, his young daughter in tow, with the force of a blow to the heart.

Equal parts terror and menace, he is obsessed with finding his wife so that he can “find me a starting place in the world, find me a place where I fit.”

For all of his unsettling appearance, he is a gentle father whose daughter Zonia (Evora Griffith) is as immaculate as he is unkempt.

Loomis, magnificently portrayed by Craven, is a man shackled by what he has seen of “bones people” rising up from the ocean and walking on the water.

These bones people, Africans who died, were murdered or killed themselves during the middle passage rather than become slaves, walk to the shore where they take on new flesh. Loomis, in the throes of a seizure, sees them on the beach, and he is unable to stand up.

That inability to stand is a clear comment on the plight of blacks who were stripped, not just naked, but to the bone by slavery, and find themselves unable to stand. Only when blacks reconnect with their African past—with the bones people—will they be able to stand.

Even Seth who never experienced slavery is frustrated by his inability to convince friends to invest in his business making pots and pans. Despite the clear profit potential, he is left without legs on which to stand—bitterly bargaining with a white peddler he works for.

Aside from Bertha and Loomis’ scripture-spouting wife, Martha Pentecost (Adilah Barnes) the women in ‘Joe Turner’ are an abandoned victim and a victorious vamp. While she may be a victim, Kimberly LaMarque as Mattie Campbell remains sensuous and sensitive, with enough seductive power to momentarily get the driven Loomis’ attention.

Molly Cunningham (Anna Deavere Smith) takes the world as she finds it, secure in her ability to get what she wants from men.

After agreeing to take off with Jeremy Furlow (Tyrone Granderson Jones), Molly announces her conditions: “Molly don’t work, Molly ain’t for sale and Molly don’t go south.”

Furlow, a guitar-playing laborer, looks at life pretty much from between his legs. He had convinced Mattie to move in with him, only to leave her for Molly.

Bynum, once again, is the philosopher. He had counseled Furlow that “you just can’t look at a woman as something to jump off into bed with.” He reminds Furlow that it was his mother who “made something out of you. A woman is everything a man needs.”

When a people forget who they are, mindless sensuality is but a short step away. But that sensuality is not always of the flesh, as Martha Pentecost illustrates with her fervent recitations.

Even as she steadfastly repeats the Twenty-Third Psalm during the climactic reunion with Loomis and her daughter, Loomis sees another Jesus—the one standing there “with a whip in one hand and a tally board in the other.”

If Martha found her salvation in the blood of Jesus, Loomis finds his in his own blood.

“I’m standing,” he shouts after he bears his chest and cuts himself in a symbolic crucifixion. “My legs stood up.”

“You can see a man’s song written on him. If a man forgets his song, he forgets who he is.”

Loomis’ salvation purposefully follows his earlier questioning of God.

“Why God got to be so big?” he asked. “Why he got to be bigger than me?”

Loomis, the symbol of stunned, disoriented blacks, and Bynum, the embodiment of lost traditions, must reunite to make each other whole. Loomis finally recognizes Bynum as “one of them bones people,” and Bynum knows Loomis is his “shiny man.”

The entire cast turns in solid performances, but Browne and Craven are simply superb. They play off one another with a captivating energy in scenes often more memorable for their poetry than for their action.

If ever an unpredictable, angry wound set foot on stage, it is Craven in this transcendent performance. And Browne has taken the power to heal and triumphantly made it flesh.

Wilson’s work speaks to black Americans with an artistry, honesty and force rare in contemporary theater. A whispered chorus of amens rustled through the theater as Bynum held forth on the importance of song:

“You can see a man’s song written on him. If a man forgets his song, he forgets who he is.”

And again:

“When a man forgets his song, he goes off in search of it until he finds out he has it inside himself.”

With Joe Turner, Wilson demonstrates that he is a poet in full possession of his powers. He, too, is a gifted conjurer with an unerring ear for the cadences of black speech.

We have seen Wilson explore the discovery of song in “Fences,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

Before the family leaves for Troy Maxson’s funeral at the end of “Fences,” Maxson’s brother, Gabriel, faces a fateful moment when he has to blow the trumpet he has been carrying around.

But he can’t get a note out of the battered, useless old instrument. He then reaches inside to the center of his being and finds a sound—a clarion call made with his own voice.

“And that’s the way that go,” he announces as the curtain falls.

“Joe Turner” is frequently revived, and I urge you to try to see it if you have access to a revival. The play’s text is also available free online. ◼︎