Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Synopsis

Set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Owners Seth and Bertha Holly play host to a makeshift family of people who come to stay, some for days, some longer, during the Great Migration of the 1910s when descendants of former slaves moved in large numbers from the South toward the industrial cities of the North, seeking new jobs, new lives and new beginnings.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 4 June 2010

As part of his great project to tell the 20th century history of black Americans on the stage, August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a key document, and one of his finest plays in the remarkable sequence.

David Lan’s Young Vic production is a fearless mix of the everyday pain and spiritual aspiration in a 1911 Pittsburgh boarding house where the residents have to pay their rent up front and join in the songs of their past as conjured by Bynum, the gardener and black consciousness-raiser.

This idea of digging for roots is extended in Patrick Burnier’s design in the red earth covering the floor of the stage and the seating area, too, as the house is a destination for black slaves and workers coming up from the south in search of freedom.

The latest of these to arrive, after serving seven years on Joe Turner’s notorious slave gang - Turner was a real-life racist brother of the governor of Tennessee - is Herald Loomis, wh...

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Latest User Review

Tyson K - 18 July 2010:

I agree with Gareth, except I feel the problem was with the staging and not the play. We could have seen a much more interesting play if we were focused on the story and not the spectacle which is what I think Lan tried to create. The text is dense, but if care is taken when directing it, it can be very accessible and illuminating to a wide range of audiences. The great performances carried this play, I just feel Lan decisions where slightly uninformed!...

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