Review: August Wilson’s “Joe Turner”

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson. Directed by Lili-Anne Brown. Staged by the Huntington Theatre Company at 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, through November 27.

Robert Cornelius, Shannon Lamb, Maurice Emmanuel Parent, and Stewart Evan Smith in HTC’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Photo: T Charles Erickson.

By Robert Israel

The Huntington Theatre Company’s reprisal of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone hits most of the right notes, despite some missteps and miscasting bumps along the way. The staging faithfully captures playwright August Wilson’s searing poetic vision, which means you should attend this production. This is a solid, stirring dramatic experience that captures the plight of restless characters whose lives pivot on the fringes of elusive self-discoveries.

Backward glancing: 36 years ago I reviewed the first production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at HTC. Much indeed has “come and gone.” Wilson died in 2005, completing 10 scripts that depicted African American life for each decade of the 20^th century (his acclaimed “American Century Cycle”). He left behind a trove of indelible memories, like the time at Ann’s Cafeteria on Huntington Ave. (now Ginger Express), he let me witness him arguing with one of his characters. “That’s the only way I know what they want me to write,” he explained to me. Gone, too, is director and former Yale Drama School dean Lloyd Richards, who died in 2006, and who schooled Wilson in the art of stagecraft. And mourned since 1991 is actor Ed Hall, who created the role of Bynum Walker; Hall and I were neighbors in Providence when he was a Trinity Rep actor and I wrote for the Providence Phoenix — you guessed it — a newspaper gone since 2014.

The drama is set in the playwright’s hometown of Pittsburgh in 1911, and Wilson, in his published text, describes this particular era as one of constant upheaval. He tells us his characters have traveled from the scorched earth of the South as “newly freed African slaves…cut off from memory…[and] arrive dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing.” Wilson’s figures, haunted by the past and wary of future, are in search of kindred spirits who can help them find ways to make their uprooted existences meaningful. Director Lili-Anne Brown is challenged to do justice to the theatrical power of a script that probes, at its core, how these embattled characters find (or ignore) their songs as, in Wilson’s phrase, “foreigners in a strange land.”

Robert Cornelius and James Ricardo Milord in HTC’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Photo: T Charles Erickson.

As the curtain rises, we meet boardinghouse owners Seth Holly (Maurice Emmanuel Parent) and his wife Bertha (Shannon Lamb). They run a “respectable” establishment — this is no barrel house. The men, women, and children who drift in and out of this space transform it into a way station filled with lost souls who are at odds with each other. Still, they share several things in common. Each is searching for an anchor, a place of belonging; each must eke out a living; each is yearning for love – from each other — and some sort of respite from an indifferent God.

And so, like the “rootworker” Bynum Walker (Robert Cornelius), they surrender to their various superstitions: burning incense, humming incantations, scratching the hardscrabble earth for herbs to make potions that “bind” people together. Or the connections are made by itinerant business men, like Rutherford Selig (Lewis D. Wheeler), who travels from town to town, pots and pans held together by a hank of rope on his back. He also helps folks find missing loved ones (always for a small fee). The play is made up of surprisingly transactional relationships — some promise to provide services, others are desperately in need of those services.

There is the sexual tension, of course Jeremy Furlow (Steward Evan Smith) is on the perpetual make. He has a guitar on his back and with it woos women aplenty who can’t resist his charms. Wilson does not develop his female characters with much depth here, serving up gender stereotypes. The wonderful actress Shannon Lamb does wonders with the role of Bertha Holly, ladling on an adroit feistiness.

Gray Flaherty and Eli Lapaix in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Photo: T Charles Erickson.

The production falters with the appearance of the youngest members of the cast (Gray Flaherty and Eli Lapaix), who play Zonia Loomis and Reuben Mercer. They fail to  convey the spirit of the next generation, one filled with hope. During the performance I attended the pair were unable to project their lines effectively and, sadly, lacked stage presence.

Kudos should go to scenic designer Arnel Sancianco, who has created a set that is airy and open, enabling fluidity of movement. Costume designer Samantha C. Jones excels, as does Jason Lynch’s lighting: at times bright with the promise of a better day and, alternatively, bathed in purple to suggest darker portents.

The production also ushers in a newly designed HTC auditorium with more comfortable seating and a newly dedicated August Wilson Lobby. Politically, this staging is a welcome event in these backsliding times — we sorely need Wilson’s poetic voice. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone challenges us to confront difficult memories and to face our collective responsibility. Have we lost our way as a community? Can we regain our sense of purpose and direction? Wilson’s characters are not afraid of baring their souls, an invitation for us to do the same.

**

A version of this review appeared in the October 25th edition of The Arts Fuse magazine (Boston).

Performer Bill Irwin: Channeling Samuel Beckett

By Robert Israel

72-year-old stage/screen actor, vaudevillian, clown, and mime Bill Irwin returns to Boston on October 26 through 30 (at Arts Emerson’s Paramount Center) via On Beckett, a one-man show dedicated to the work of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). The 90-minute production, which he conceived and performed originally at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York in 2018 (it earned him the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Alternative Theatrical Experience in 2019), draws freely from the prolific theatrical and prose canon of the Nobel laureate. He is no stranger to the writer’s poetically slapstick; he performed the role of Lucky in Waiting for Godot, (a production directed by Mike Nichols that featured Robin Williams, Lukas Haas, Steve Martin, and F. Murray Abraham, at Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theater in New York, in 1988).

I caught up with Irwin in San Francisco for a brief telephone interview during a break in rehearsal at the American Conservatory Theater. He has been traveling in what he calls a “barnstorming tour” of the show nationally.

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Bill Irwin in the Irish Repertory Theatre production of On Beckett. Photo: Craig Schwartz.

Robert Israel: You’ve been living and performing Samuel Beckett’s works for several decades now. What specifically about his work has gotten into your craw?

Bill Irwin: After all this time performing his work, I wish I could say several pithy things about him and his work, but all I can say is that Beckett’s work speaks to me because he’s a very visceral writer. And, because I have training as a clown, I think of him as a natural clown, he grew up a clown, and he had a thing for clowns. He was fascinated with Laurel and Hardy. He wrote a film starring pantomime Buster Keaton. And I share an affinity with his Irish roots. Many years ago I went to school in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, so I draw on that experience as a young man living in Ireland when I read and perform him.

RI: It has been documented that Beckett had a great disdain for Ireland.

Irwin: Yes, that’s true, he did. He left Ireland and he went to live in Paris in the midst of all that literary and artistic ferment that was going on there before and after World War II. He left Ireland because he was hurt and pissed off, he was furious with his family, and he was full of mad rebellion. He had a very difficult relationship with Ireland and with his family. And a lot of that comes across in his plays. But not in all his works.

RI: In what specific works of his do you find a different side to him?

Irwin: I’ll probably go to my grave having not read all of his novels, but to me, a different side of him comes across in his letters and in his postcards. He was not the first born son in his family, but he writes home with the tone of a dutiful son, and in many of his letters he’s not only gracious but kind and loving.

RI: Playwright Harold Pinter once noted that Beckett was extremely gracious.

Irwin: Yes, that’s true. Pinter met Beckett in Paris and they went out for a night of heavy drinking and acting like party animals, and Pinter collapsed from too much drink. They were in an all-night café. Pinter remembered that Beckett disappeared and came back to minister to him a glass of bicarbonate of soda, nursing him back to consciousness. And then they proceeded to carry on the rest of the night drinking and talking. They had a terse and efficient correspondence, and Beckett’s graciousness came across there, too, in his critiques of Pinter’s plays. But Beckett was not as austere as he comes across in his works.

RI: You mentioned Beckett’s penchant for being visceral. Do you ever find yourself over-thinking your interpretation of his works when performing this show?

Bill Irwin: After many years performing him, there are times I take stock in it and wonder if I need to figure it out again, to make it better, to move the text around a bit. But the impetus of the show, for me, is the joy of sharing it with audiences, so I return to that. I don’t mention this in the show, but I got to meet Sam Beckett many years ago in New York. I was so overwhelmed meeting him that I don’t remember saying much to him, but I do remember that he was very gracious. And the late New York Times reporter Mel Gussow told me he mentioned me to Beckett, and that Beckett complimented my work. So, I will bring those memories of having briefly met him when I perform his work in Boston.

**

A previous version of this interview appeared in The Arts Fuse magazine (Boston) on Oct. 22, 2022.