August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: History, Legacy and New Broadway Revival

It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911... From the deep and near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their hearts kicking in their chests with a song worth singing.
—From August Wilson’s introduction to the text of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

In the summer of 1984, before he made his Broadway debut as a playwright, 39-year-old August Wilson announced an audacious goal: He would write a play set in each decade of the 20th century, “to isolate the most important ideas that confronted Blacks.” Twenty years later, Wilson was diagnosed with liver cancer, but he completed his objective just before passing away in 2005. The 10 plays of his “Pittsburgh Cycle” form a legacy of greatness, and the poetic drama widely considered the finest of them all, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, is back on Broadway in a revival starring Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer, directed by Debbie Allen. Here’s a look back at how Wilson’s colorful life shaped his masterpiece.

Hill District Blues
No one living in Pittsburgh’s hardscrabble Hill District in 1945 could have imagined that Frederick August Kittel Jr. (named for his mostly absent white German father) would grow up to win two Pulitzer Prizes and a Tony Award, his signature gracing the front of a Broadway theater. The fourth of six children of Daisy Wilson, who had left North Carolina in 1937, Freddy and his siblings lived in a two-room apartment under their mother’s strict discipline. Recognizing her son’s intellect, Daisy dreamed of him becoming a lawyer, but Freddy (who changed his name to August Wilson at age 20) had his sights set on a career as a writer. He dropped out of high school after being falsely accused of plagiarism and immersed himself in reading and writing while taking on menial jobs, often quitting abruptly over racist microaggressions.

During the 1970s, Wilson wrote poetry and short stories, influenced by the blues of Bessie Smith and the art of Romare Bearden. Eventually, he concluded that theater would be the ideal medium to illuminate Black history and culture. “The crafting of a play was new to me,” he acknowledged in the preface to a compilation of his early works. “But since I had been writing for 15 years, I was not without discipline. Fiction was a story told through character and dialogue, and a poem was a distillation of language and images designed to reveal an emotive response... Why couldn’t a play be both?” His acceptance into the 1982 National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, where he met director Lloyd Richards, set him on the road to critical and commercial success.

Theatrical Juggling Act
It took six tries for Wilson to be accepted at the O’Neill Center, on the strength of what his biographer Patti Hartigan calls “a rambling script” of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, “rewritten many times in bars.” Unable to front the money for a plane ticket to New York, he took a bus from St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was working as a cook at the Little Brothers of the Poor social services center. New York Times critic Frank Rich broke protocol to publish a rave review of Ma Rainey’s O’Neill mounting, which helped catapult the play to Broadway, where it ran for eight months and received a 1985 Best Play Tony nomination. Over a four-year period, under Richards’ mentorship, Wilson developed Ma Rainey, the smash hit Fences, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson, an astonishing feat of theatrical juggling.

A Mesmerizing Vision
Fences, the story of a fraught father-son relationship, became Wilson’s most successful play, winning both the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award, but it wasn’t his favorite. The original Broadway production was riddled with conflict between Wilson and James Earl Jones, who pushed for a more upbeat ending. (Denzel Washington’s 2016 film adaptation netted Wilson a posthumous Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.) The play that best fulfilled the goal Wilson had set for himself—the one he wished had been honored with a Pulitzer and Tony—was Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Inspired by the Romare Bearden painting "Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket (Pittsburgh Memories)," which features a defeated looking man in a hat and coat, Wilson created 11 vivid characters who cross paths in a Pittsburgh boarding house in the summer of 1911.

Joe Turner initially appears to be a realistic tale of domestic life, with the tenants enjoying coffee and biscuits in the kitchen of proprietors Bertha and Seth Holly. But an undercurrent of the supernatural is present in the character of Bynum, a “conjure man” who claims to be able to bind people together with the power of his song. Handsome guitar player Jeremy is torn between two young women, Mattie and Molly. Rutherford Selig, one of only three white characters in any of Wilson’s plays, is a peddler and “people finder” who drops by every Saturday to trade with Seth.

The story takes a potentially ominous turn when Herald Loomis, wearing a hat and long coat, arrives with his 11-year-old daughter, Zonia. After serving seven years on the notorious Tennessee chain gang of Joe Turner, he has traveled north to look for his wife, Martha. Seth immediately judges Loomis to be “wild-eyed, mean-looking,” and the end of Act One seems to support that view when Herald experiences a frightening vision while the others work themselves into a frenzy doing the Juba, an African-American dance.

Wilson takes his time with these characters, even giving the child Zonia two scenes with a neighbor boy. An undercurrent of spirituality runs through the play, which is dotted with personal touches, noted in Hartigan’s biography: Zonia and Bynum were the names of the playwright’s grandmother and grandfather; his great-grandfather was from Rutherford, North Carolina; and Herald (rather than Harold) “is a messenger of personal and spiritual freedom that is yet to arrive.”

Critical Raves, Brief Runs
After a series of regional productions, and buoyed by Rich’s enthusiastic early reviews, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone opened on Broadway on March 27, 1988, starring 2026 Oscar nominee Delroy Lindo as Herald, L. Scott Caldwell (who won a Tony) as Bertha and Angela Bassett as Martha. Hopes were high after Rich praised the play’s “true mystery and high drama,” among other critical raves, but the production closed after three months.

Four years after Wilson’s death, Lincoln Center Theater mounted a sumptuous revival at Broadway’s Belasco Theater, directed by Bartlett Sher, who had won a Tony the season before for his hit revival of South Pacific. The choice of Sher sparked controversy, given Wilson’s insistence on using Black directors, but the company (including Ernie Hudson as Seth, LaTanya Richardson Jackson as Bertha and future playwright Danai Gurira as Molly) rallied around their director. Although the revival received six 2009 Tony nominations (with a win for Roger Robinson as Bynum) and Times critic Ben Brantley hailed it as “a drama of indisputable greatness,” the two-month limited run was not extended.

Return of a Modern Classic
“It found me. It was time. It was right.” That’s how Debbie Allen describes her decision to direct the highly anticipated new Broadway revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Speaking with Broadway.com at a press event, Allen emphasized, “What an incredible diamond to put in my hand, to see how I’m going to cut it—because that’s what it is.” Allen had already been tapped by Denzel Washington to direct a movie version of the play, which she knew well, having attended opening night in 1988. What’s more, her sister, Phylicia Rashad, starred on Broadway in Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean in 2004 and directed a regional production of Fences nine years later. It made sense to tackle the play first, so Allen wrote a 40-page study guide for her cast examining Wilson’s intent and the historical context of the play, with thoughts on interpreting it in 2026.

And what a cast! Oscar nominee Taraji P. Henson is making her Broadway debut as Bertha alongside Cedric the Entertainer as Seth, Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Bynum and Tony nominee Joshua Boone (The Outsiders) as Herald. Santiago-Hudson brings a treasure chest of Wilson knowledge to his new role: He won a 1996 Best Featured Actor Tony for Seven Guitars; received a 2017 Tony nomination for directing a revival of Jitney; co-starred in Gem of the Ocean; adapted Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for a Netflix film; and performed Wilson’s autobiographical solo show How I Learned What I Learned off-Broadway.

“What I dream and pray for as I get into these years in my career is to have more opportunities to do August Wilson,” the modest multi-hyphenate told Broadway.com, “and Debbie Allen has given me that opportunity. I want to make sure that August is proud, and I want to make sure that Debbie is proud.” Henson also reveres Allen, who played her mother in a Lifetime series and directed her in multiple TV projects. “You don’t tell Debbie Allen no,” she quipped to Broadway.com. “She called me and said, ‘I have this August Wilson,’ and I said, ‘What? Yes, I’m doing it.’”

Herald Loomis arrives in Pittsburgh with his daughter “searching for a world that contains his image,” Wilson explained. “The years of bondage to Joe Turner have disrupted his life and severed his connection with his past.” In taking on this now-iconic role, Boone recognizes that everyone in the audience will experience the play in a unique way. “I just want people to feel,” he told Broadway.com. “People will get different things, and whatever that is, great. Just feel.”

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