Every professional production of one of the 10 plays in August Wilson’s so-called Pittsburgh Cycle is an occasion for hope and even excitement. All of them are tough to pull off, but so rewarding that even the attempts that fall short make one glad that someone tried. What Lili-Anne Brown’s revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone may lack in staging grace it more than makes up for in guts, and the full-blooded, fully-voiced acting on display at Boston’s historic, newly renovated Huntington Theater is well worth any theatergoer’s time and attention.
Joe Turner is one of Wilson’s most daring blends of mysticism and naturalism; I’d place it midway on a continuum between the super-spiritual Gem of the Ocean at one extreme, and the raucous slice-of-life Jitney at the other. The boarding house of Bertha and Seth Holly circa 1911 teems with energy and yearning. A wide variety of characters cope with the day-to-day: finding or keeping a job; finding or maintaining love; eating and sleeping; or simply passing the time in reminiscence and tall tales.
It’s on this level that the Huntington production is most successful, and fortunately it’s the level that is most apt to engage audiences. Brown has cast the show perfectly down to the smallest role, with actors skilled at bringing out their characters’ deepest emotions as well as moments of ease. The Hollys are the story’s anchors, and Melanie Loren (ably stepping in for Shannon Lamb at the performance attended) and the amusingly gruff Maurice Emmanuel Parent are utterly comfortable as long-marrieds, in contrast with the timorous Mattie and the sensual, self-absorbed Mollie (Al-nisa Petty and Dela Meskienyar respectively; both terrific). Whether young Jeremy (lanky Stewart Evan Smith) pops in to decry his boss’s corruption, or flirt with the single ladies without putting a ring on it, he adds to the consistent illusion of real life going on up there, and we wrap ourselves in their stories like a warm blanket.
The director also artfully manipulates the rhythms and contours of Wilson’s fascinating, maddening modes of discourse, from long monologues – arias, almost – to call-and-response. It’s a pleasure to see a show that attends to solid cue pick-up while carefully incorporating a variety of pauses along the way.
Still, Joe Turner has metaphorical, even metaphysical dimensions that this production fails to tap. This is 1911, after all, when the legacy of slavery is a here-and-now calamity for its sons and daughters, coping at the same time with the stress points of the Great Migration from an oppressive South to the no-more-congenial North. “Joe Turner” himself is The Man: still racist, still corrupt, still willing and able to trap the Black man into servitude – seven years on a chain gang in the case of Herald Loomis (James Milord), followed by a years-long search for the wife (Patrese D. Martin) he couldn’t even say goodbye to.
The house’s resident storyteller and visionary Bynum (Robert Cornelius) crystallizes the problems of identity and freedom in the concept of “a loss of one’s song,” and when the Hollys and their guests fall into their weekly celebratory “Juba” dance, we feel in our bones the importance of having a song to sing and share.
But though Cornelius is a sturdy presence as the “binding man” whose mission is to heal others’ pain, the staging and lighting don’t do enough to vitalize his spookier incantations, or make his outdoor rituals with pigeon blood seem anything other than mundane. Milord exudes a properly frightening measure of Old Testament righteousness, but in this realistic context his anger and terror often seem forced.
The requisite shifts to otherworldly concerns aren’t particularly assisted by Jason Lynch’s lighting choices, and changing the color scheme on the cyc adds little. I’m not sure whether the gigantic staircase and upper landing of Arnel Sancianco’s set are meant to suggest the heavy weight of history, or the prison bars that still oppress Herald, or the bridge between North and South (I’m just reaching here), but whatever they’re meant to connote, they wear out their welcome in scene one and aren’t used enough to justify their dominating presence. Meanwhile, Brown almost never avails herself of evocative stage pictures – partly, I believe, because of all the dining room clutter center and left – and the blocking is often rudimentary: characters squaring off face to face. When Herald is finally reunited with the wife he has desperately sought, Milord has his back to us in the middle of people and furniture, so the moment fizzles.
Samantha C. Jones’s costume designs brilliantly work to support time, place, and character, contributing to the naturalism that, again, is only half the Joe Turner battle. Yet even if this attempt at a fiendishly difficult work isn’t all it could be, it still thrills; it’s still a gripping evening in the theater.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone opened October 9, 2022 , at the Huntington Theatre Company (Boston) and runs through November 13. Tickets and information: huntingtontheatre.org
