Photo via A Noise Within’s Facebook page
In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, August Wilson renders American history not as a textbook, but as an ache in the bones of those searching for the meaning of their freedom. At A Noise Within in Pasadena, director Gregg T. Daniel guides a luminous, emotional revival that fuses the personal and the historical, drawing together the pain of separation and the collective yearning that defined the Great Migration.
Set in 1911 in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse run by Seth and Bertha Holly (played with grounded warmth by Alex Morris and Veralyn Jones), Wilson’s second chapter in his monumental ten-play “American Century Cycle” gathers an ensemble of travelers whose journeys mirror the migration. Former slaves and their descendants, freed from Southern plantations, arrive seeking jobs, kin, and perhaps the right to re-claim their own spirits.
At the center stands Herald Loomis (the formidable Kai A. Ealy), newly released after seven years’ forced labor on Joe Turner’s chain gang. His arrival, alongside his daughter Zonia (Jessica Williams), turns the boardinghouse into a crucible of longing. Loomis’s search for his missing wife (Tori Danner) becomes a spiritual quest for identity — one that collides with the faith-infused mysticism of Bynum (Gerald C. Rivers), the “rootmaker” who helps others “find their song.”
The name “Joe Turner” in Black America refers to a mythical figure and a historical figure based on Joe Turney, a man who illegally enslaved Black men for seven-year sentences as part of a convict leasing and kidnapping network in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His name is the symbolic representation of the brutal post-slavery racial oppression that forced many Black Americans to migrate North, an experience also captured in the blues song “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”
Daniel, whose previous Wilson stagings at A Noise Within (Gem of the Ocean, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II) have traced this same lineage, once again brings muscular clarity and ritual precision to Wilson’s lyricism. His production honors the playwright’s insistence that these are African people in an American landscape. Movement, prayer, and song intertwine with the everyday rhythms of conversation, making the stage feel less like a set than a living crossroads.
Tesshi Nakagawa’s weathered boardinghouse design, lit in amber tones by Karyn D. Lawrence, is a liminal space between survival and transcendence. The costumes by Kate Bergh evoke the muted dignity of the working-class, while Jeff Gardner’s subtle sound design evokes the hum of a changing century — trains, wind, and the pulse of blues. Around Ealy’s haunting portrayal of Loomis, each performer contributes a distinct shade of humanity: Rivers’s incantatory Bynum, Jones’s compassionate Bertha, Brandon Gill, Briana James, Nija Okoro, and others forming a troupe as textured and interwoven as Wilson’s dialogue itself.
Wilson once said he hoped audiences would recognize that the Black characters onstage are African people, wrestling with the same spiritual and existential questions as all of humanity. This production makes that recognition almost tangible. The boardinghouse guests are wayfarers, but they are also mirrors, reflecting the audience’s own dislocated search for belonging.
By evening’s end, as Loomis reclaims his song — part wail, part hymn — the title becomes prophecy. Joe Turner, both man and myth, may have come and gone, but the need to define one’s freedom endures.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone runs through Nov. 9 at A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. For tickets and information: anoisewithin.org.
