Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Joe Turner's Come and Gone
by August Wilson
April 30 – June 8, 2025
Directed by: Lou Bellamy
Join the journey & discover where you belong.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in a 1911 Pittsburgh boarding house, follows Herald Loomis’ search for identity and belonging. This August Wilson masterpiece captures the essence of the African American post- slavery experience, weaving together themes of heritage, freedom, and the deep yearning for a place to call home.
As Loomis searches for his lost family, his journey mirrors the broader African American pursuit of identity and cultural grounding following the abolition of slavery. This narrative is a profound reflection on resilience, community bonds, and the indomitable spirit of freedom.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a powerful exploration of the significance of community in guiding individual journeys, and the unbreakable desire to find where one truly belongs. It is a story of rebirth & a celebration of African American resilience and a reminder of the power of discovering where you belong.
Mild smoke and haze are used in this production, which is recommended for ages 13+
Find complete content notes here.
CAST
Herald Loomis: La'Tevin Alexander*^
Bynum Walker: Lester Purry*
Seth Holly: Bobby Bermea*
Bertha Holly: Ramona Lisa Alexander*
Rutherford Selig: Leif Norby*
Jeremy Furlow: Xzavier Beacham
Mattie Campbell: Ashlee Radney^
Molly Cunningham: Tessa May
Martha Loomis: Cycerli Ash*
Zonia Loomis: Ellis-Blake Hale & Nia Scott
Reuben Mercer: Justin Karneh & Kamari Rivers
CREATIVE TEAM
Playwright: August Wilson
Director: Lou Bellamy
Stage Manager: David Levine
Scenic Designer: Tyler Buswell
Lighting Designer: Miranda k Hardy
Costume Designer: Wanda Walden
Sound Designer: Rory Breshears
Properties Designer & Asst. Carpenter: Ryann St. Julien
Director of Production: Thyra Hartshorn
Blues Guitar Consultant & Music Creation: Norman Sylvester
Blues Guitarist: Tevis Hodge Jr.
Head Carpenter: Brent Hall
Head Electrician: Joshua Yoon
Scenic Artist: Sarah Kindler
Dramaturg: Pancho Savery
Cultural Competency Consultant: Keela Johnson
Production Apprentices: Aariyana Gould+ & Ciel Pope+
Production Intern: Clem Schonfeld
Appears as courtesy of Actor's Equity
Portland Playhouse Apprentice Company Member
Former Portland Playhouse Apprentice Company Member
~ United Scenic Artists
“All You Got to Do Is Sing It. Then You Be Free”: August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
by Pancho Savery, Dramaturg
Every serious theatre-goer by now is familiar with August Wilson’s “Twentieth Century Cycle,” ten plays written between 1979 and 2005, each one depicting African American life during a different decade. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984), the second play in the cycle, depicts the second decade of the century. In 1911, African Americans, to a significant extent, have become rootless. With the end of the “peculiar institution” of slavery in 1865, many of the formerly enslaved begin the search for family members from whom they had been forcibly separated. There was then the brief period of Reconstruction (1865-1877), when Black people attained various rights, but it ended far too soon. In addition, because of the rise of the Klan, the fear of lynching, and various environmental disasters, this decade marked the beginning of The Great Migration, when millions of African Americans left the South and migrated to the North in search of jobs, freedom, and a new sense of identity (see Jacob Lawrence’s monumental The Migration Series (1941), sixty tempera paintings that document the journey).
The exodus would be further stimulated later in the decade when World War I started, European immigration dwindled, and there were jobs galore in the North. In the South, even though slavery had officially ended, it was replaced by the system of sharecropping, which was simply slavery by another name, another way to force Black workers into hard work for little to no pay, and often leaving them in debt. Because of a more limited lack of free labor, there was also a wide-spread policy of arresting African American men on the trumped-up charge of vagrancy for which they would have to work for free, often for as many as seven years to pay off their “debt.” The notorious Black Codes further limited Black freedom, restricting voting, labor, and property ownership, and this would be continued with Jim Crow.
Also adding to the tension in the play, there is the additional situation of northern free-born, middle-class Blacks looking down on their newly-arrived, southern, usually lower class, brethren with their “country” ways. Another form of tension had to do with Christianity, in which the enslaved had been told to obey their masters and wait for salvation in the next life. Some still clung to it and believed, some had abandoned it completely, and others had returned to African to (or still kept) various forms of African religious practices.
Panel No. 1 from Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series, casein tempera on hardboard, 1940-41
This is the background of Wilson’s play.
In the midst of all this turmoil, the Pittsburgh boardinghouse of Seth and Bertha Holly becomes a kind of oasis, or a lighthouse for lost ships/souls. All of the nine other characters spend time there. Some have lived there for years, some have lived there and moved on, some are just passing through, and some are neighbors just there for a visit.
In a 1999 Paris Review interview, Wilson revealed that his greatest source of inspiration was what he called the “Four Bs.” The Bs stand for the blues, African American painter and collagist Romare Bearden, African poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, and Argentine poet and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges. The influence of Borges (1899-1986) comes from both his sense of the fantastic in texts such as Ficciones and The Aleph, and his detective stories written with Adolfo Bioy Casares. From Bearden (1911-1988), Wilson gets an appreciation for working class Blacks both northern and southern, an appreciation for Black folk traditions such as conjure men and women, and looking at the lives of Blacks through a single Black lens as opposed to the limiting double-consciousness lens of W.E.B. Du Bois, made famous in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). From Baraka (1934-2014), Wilson gets an appreciation for all forms of Black music and the importance of theatre by, for, and about Black people, especially Baraka’s Afro-centric work during the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and ‘70s.
There are many themes in this play: the husband-wife relationship, the parent-child relationship, the role of Christianity in Black life, migration, conjure practices, and a detective mystery, among others; but the most important theme is music…
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