Review: Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's Superb JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE

As many Baltimore theatergoers are aware, the theater companies of Baltimore, professional and community alike, are collaborating in a presentation of playwright August Wilson’s entire ten-play Century Cycle, sometimes known as the Pittsburgh Cycle (although one of the plays is set in Chicago). Whatever you call it, the Cycle boasts one play for each decade of the Twentieth Century. When the project is fully realized, two or three seasons from now, each play will have been performed, with the decades in correct chronological order, with nine different Baltimore theater groups each chipping in one show. (Chesapeake Shakespeare Company will present one extra.)

The project kicked off earlier this year with an excellent rendering of Gem of the Ocean by Baltimore’s Arena Players. And now comes the second play in the cycle, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, served up by Chesapeake Shakespeare Company.

Both for the scale and the nature of the effort, this is a signal moment in Baltimore’s theatrical life. It can be argued (and I now believe) that Wilson not only stands in the first rank of American Playwrights, but is also the preeminent Black American playwright, and that the Baltimore theater community’s audacious stab at rendering Wilson’s foremost achievement in full is both an encouraging act of solidarity in the world of Baltimore theater and a cause for celebration.

This was not my initial view of Wilson. When I first saw Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at what is now Baltimore Center Stage in 2007, I actually came away somewhat repelled, primarily by what I privately considered the “mumbo jumbo,” the extensive irruptions of unexplained and to me incoherent Black folk religion into what might otherwise have been a passable working-class drama. That view was reinforced by seeing Everyman Theatre’s production of Gem of the Ocean shortly thereafter, in 2008. What explained my reaction then, and what has changed it? I’ll elaborate more further down this column, but, in brief, as a White critic, I stood in need of some education. And this was education that I now see Wilson was trying to dangle in front of audiences of all colors. Which is not to suggest that Wilson regarded these works as primarily didactic. He was writing plays, after all, not lecturing. I think he was content to let audiences, perhaps White ones in particular, struggle a bit to catch up. But he did want us to catch up. And I think now we largely have.

From where Wilson, who was born in 1945, stood, not only was the Black America he came into still reeling from the seismic aftershocks of slavery (from the Middle Passage onwards), but also from more recent cataclysms: the failure of Reconstruction, a failure that is still largely with us all, and from the then-fresh upheaval caused by the Great Migration (of Southern Blacks to the North), which is usually presented as a necessary and good thing, but which also had its downside for the migrants and their families. (Opportunities could be denied just as effectively up here.) These traumas were still reverberating in the souls of the characters in the two plays I’ve just mentioned, even though none of them (with the exception of semi-immortal Aunt Ester in Gem) is nearly old enough to have experienced the earliest events personally. The psychic wounds these traumas inflicted were, in Wilson’s view, not merely still afflicting people like his characters in the times in which these plays were set, but they were largely spiritual in nature, and that part could only properly be addressed spiritually, through what I had initially thought of as “mumbo jumbo.” I missed what Wilson was up to because, well, though I thought of myself as well-educated, I really didn’t know this history nearly well enough to understand the facts Wilson would have taken as a given, or to grasp how that history would naturally have affected the characters.

Joe Turner is set in 1911 in a boarding house (not the same house, but in the same neighborhood, as the house which served much the same set of functions in Gem). Each sojourner in the house has been injured by the various traumas just discussed. All of these things broke up families and social connections, often again and again. Not one sojourner foregrounded by the play has lived untouched by those deracinating ruptures. But some are more healers, and some are more in need of healing.

As the proprietors of the establishment, Seth and Bertha Holly, (Jefferson A. Russell and Aakhu TuahNera Freeman), are better described as healers. Apparently longer settled in the neighborhood, the Hill District of Pittsburgh, than some of the characters, and more continuously attached to their spot than other more itinerant ones, the Hollys boast three streams of income between them (the boarding house, a factory job, and a side job fabricating pans) and healthy habits of restraint that serve them well. The restraint may at times clash with their generosity, but they seem the best-adjusted and most successful of the characters. Yet it is made explicit that the economic and financial constraints confronting them have, from the time of their arrival, placed limits on their assimilation into Pittsburgh. Still, being a healer also helps to heal them too.

There are two somewhat itinerant characters who, one might say, come equipped with homing beacons. One is the White peddler Rutherford Selig (Joe Crea) who apparently makes regular calls at this house while he peddles pots and pans on the road. He claims a sideline as a “people finder.” In a play peopled with more than one character who has lost other people, in the most literal sense of the word, a “people finder” would be a good resource. (Wilson is a little bit coy about whether Selig really finds people, but he at least engenders hope, which may be worthwhile enough in itself.) And his work in kitchenware makes him an asset to one and all – including, of course, the Hollys, who sell some of their handiwork to him.

Bynum Walker (CSC stalwart Gregory Burgess), though a lot more mysterious about his social role and how he performs it, clearly also spends much time on the road as he purveys various root-based nostrums. But does also deals in the craft of forging a path to the African spirit-life which lives on in almost all of the characters, colored partly by voodoo and partly by Black evangelical Christianity, but also decked in a distinct Wilsonian hue. In both this play and Gem, a character conducts what amounts to a séance where the characters collectively travel back to a land of bones at the bottom of the sea, bones which most likely belonged to those who died in the Middle Passage, the horrific transport across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas that had conducted multitudes to slavery. In both plays, the return to this land and the apocalyptic visions experienced there become hugely consequential.

Introduced into the midst of this boarding house society are Jeremy, an immature, flashy, guitar-playing construction worker (Miles Folley), Mattie, a mostly sensible young woman to whom the world is nonetheless a bit like a dating app (Zipporah Brown Gladden), and Molly, a pretty and independent woman (Mecca Verdell). Each of the three is clearly on a quest of the heart, and clearly these quests will interact. As well, there are the Loomises, Herald (Josh Wilder) and his nine-year-old daughter Zonia (Kenya Mitchell alternating with Mikayla Uqdah). Herald was a deacon before his life and that of his family were knocked completely off course one day by an appalling act sanctioned by Jim Crow laws; as a result of this act, father and daughter have lost all contact with their wife and mother, and do not know her whereabouts. (A bona fide people-finder, if Bynum is truly one, would therefore come in handy.)

Everyone, then is looking for something and/or someone, what Bynum calls their song. Here is his explanation:

Now, I used to travel all up and down, this road and that… looking here and there. Searching. Just like you, Mr. Loomis. I didn’t know what I was searching for. The only thing I knew was something was keeping me dissatisfied. Something wasn’t making my heart smooth and easy. Then one day my daddy gave me a song. That song had a weight to it that was hard to handle. That song was hard to carry. I fought against it. Didn’t want to accept that song. I tried to find my daddy to give him the song. But I found out it wasn’t his song. It was my song. It had come from way deep inside me.

This may or may not be a literal song; substitute self-understanding or a more focused pursuit of mission or just reunion with lost ones, perhaps. But the song image is a strong one. Bynum’s ultimate quest seems to be to encounter one particular person whose own song will make them “shine like new money.” This being a comedy at its core, no matter how tragic the surrounding circumstances, all of the characters’ quests are on the path to successful resolution, including the “new money” quest. But not in ways that the audience is always likely to anticipate.

The song concept captures the two parts of Wilson’s particular style, which extends both to dialogue and action. Yes, the mystical, spiritual side of things is real within Wilson’s fable, which can be and sometimes is expressed poetically, but so is a grounded, intensely observed, plain-spoken and extremely recognizable manner of Black vernacular. (Shining like new money, for instance, is both a very poetic and a very commonplace image.) Wilson’s characters are well-used to circumscribed lives and circumscribed possibilities, and they mostly avoid highfallutin’ thinking, and their speech will ordinarily reflect it. But something of the elevated is there in the speech and the plotting.

That mixture bothered me in 2007. In the light of fuller information, what then appeared strange now seems obvious. Of course these characters are suffering from maladies of the soul! And yes, even a half-century after emancipation! Of course they are going to have to resort to poetry and to mystical measures to heal, because that is involved with most soul-healing! But likewise each of them will exhibit a keenly-honed appreciation of the realistic boundaries of his or her life; failure to do so, anywhere in the country, could prove fatal at any point in their lives to the date of the action of the play. Naturally, the reconciliation of those two sides is not going to be neat, not drawing-room comedy concise or clear. Wilson was drawing from life, which is chaotic and messy, and writing about a community that had been badly messed with. Nor did I appreciate then the sheer playwright’s “ear” that Wilson brought to his dialogue, an ear which guaranteed the trueness of his vision.

Back to the current production, then, and now I can be much briefer. In brief, it is superb. KenYatta Rogers’ direction seems to pick up every trick, and the casting is uniformly excellent, down to the two children (Kenya Mitchell and Andre Walker on press night). The costumes work, the lighting is unobtrusive but effective, as is the sound design. There is nothing to fault, and hence little to discuss.

I would only mention that Bynum and Seth seem like the roles of a lifetime for Burgess and Russell, respectively. Each of these actors is quite familiar to local audiences. I’ve seen Burgess with Chesapeake Shakespeare as Shylock, Falstaff, and Scrooge, among many others, and he does well with these essentially character roles. Bynum is surely a character role too, with his odd, slightly squirrelly collection of views and of both practical and unlikely lines of work. But something just fits Burgess even better this time around. Even if Burgess does not quite tip his hand as to what makes Bynum tick, one senses he knows, and is drawing on that private knowledge; Bynum is operating on rules that may not be quite visible to us, but can often surprise us. Russell is more of a utility player, whom I’ve seen in varied roles at Everyman, but the way he eases into the repartee with Bertha tells us volumes about both their contentiousness and their contentedness with each other. The delicate equipoise of these tendencies makes them fun to watch together. And a tip of the hat while we’re at it to Freeman as Bertha, written as Seth’s perfect foil, rendered perfectly believable and logical in that role.

My failure to single out anyone else in the cast is not meant to slight them. They all deserved credit for this marvelous ensemble showing. (And there's one character, and hence cast member, I can't mention because that would be a spoiler.)

Let me end with a slightly left-handed bit of praise. I noticed that in this production the cast members did not provide a pre-first-act musicale or an entr’acte one. These have been customary events at Chesapeake Shakespeare, but not this time. I didn’t miss them. The performers at Chesapeake Shakespeare are professional actors, but not usually professional musicians, and the volume levels are often wrong when the audience is talkative. Probably the issue should be decided play by play, but here this was a case of addition by subtraction. Good call.

And it would be a good call for Baltimore audiences to throng this play, and this entire project.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, by August Wilson, directed by KenYatta Rogers, presented through October 13, 2024 by Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, at 7 South Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21202. Adult tickets starting at $59, with certain discounts available. Tickets available at the Box office, at 410-244-8570 and at ChesapeakeShakespeare.com. Some material may be too intense for younger theatergoers.

Production photo credit: Kiirstn Pagan Photography.

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