It’s spring in Chicago, but there’s a distinct feeling of August in the air with two fine productions of August Wilson plays now onstage: How I Learned What I Learned featuring a masterful Harry Lennix performance at Broadway Playhouse, and now Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, delivering a slow build with a tremendous emotional payoff at the Goodman.
Directed by Chuck Smith, who handles both Wilson’s humor and haunting depths with assurance, the second of the 10 plays in Wilson’s Century Cycle exploring the 20th century Black experience in America is set in a Pittsburgh boarding house circa 1911.
The house is a handsome one, passed down in the family to Seth Holly (played with both emotional depth and perfect comic timing by Dexter Zollicoffer), an older man who crafts pots and pans out of sheet metal when he isn’t working the night shift at a machine shop for the white owner. Seth’s wife, Bertha (TayLar, who plays her as every bit Seth’s match and more), keeps the boardinghouse running while he comes in after his shift to complain about the tenants and his inability to secure a loan to open his own shop.
That is the first length we see of the oppressive white supremacist rope tying everyone in the place down. It becomes most apparent when the characters strain against it, but it’s always there, squeezing. Seth would have to sign over his house to the bank to secure the small loan he needs. It’s hard to argue with his suspicion that signing the deal would lead to the loss of his property.
Next, one of the boarders, Jeremy Furlow (an electric, energetic Anthony Fleming III), loses his job on a road construction crew after he refuses to pay the white bully demanding a percentage of each Black worker’s wages.
And then there’s Herald Loomis, the character who, well, looms over the proceedings like a thunderhead racing across the plains. With his young daughter Zonia in tow, Loomis has come up from the South, scouring the countryside to find his wife, whom he lost after being kidnapped by a former slave owner. Even more than four decades after the Civil War, the man simply decided to keep enslaving Black men he and his enforcers encountered walking down the road, conscripting them to work on his plantation for seven years before releasing them.
It’s a horrific story, and it has visited horrific trauma on Loomis, played with surreal intensity by A.C. Smith. It’s an explosive performance of a piece with some of Brian Dennehy’s best work on this stage. Herald is a man who clearly doesn’t know what to do with all of his hurt and knows no good way to reclaim all that has been stolen from him. What will he do when he finally catches up with the wife he believes abandoned him and their daughter? It’s frightening to contemplate. It’s possible that one of the boarders, backyard shaman Bynum Walker (Tim Edward Rhoze, in a truly stellar turn), may be able to help him hold it together.
Everything the people in this boardinghouse have built in their lives is provisional, existing only because the white power structure hasn’t decided to take it. Yet. Rutherford Selig, the one white character, is portrayed by Gary Houston with a pragmatic and enigmatic attitude thinly covering his racism. Selig sells Seth sheet metal, but is primarily known as a man who can find anyone. Pay this traveling salesman a dollar and he will bring back word of whoever you’re looking for after his next trip. It turns out he honed this skill by helping his father catch runaway slaves, as he explains in a chillingly matter-of-fact conversation over breakfast.
That at least some of these folks are able to move onward and upward under this oppressive shadow is a marvel. And Wilson does something really marvelous in giving full scenes to Zonia (Kylah Renee Jones in a winning portrayal) and Reuben Mercer, a neighborhood boy her age (played with confident charm by Harper Anthony) intent on sparking a romance. In the next generation, there is always hope. Though we know from where we sit in the 21st century that their road won’t be much easier than the one traveled by their parents.
(Disclosure: My wife is a member of the Goodman’s leadership team.)
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone runs through May 19 at the Goodman Theatre.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Liz Lauren
