Two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission. At the Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47th Street.
Almost without fail, the brilliance of August Wilson emerges even in mediocre stagings of his plays.
That is the unshakable feeling at the revival of his “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” that opened Saturday night at the Barrymore Theatre. You’re never less than pleased you’ve come, and yet you’re constantly aware that something’s gone.
What thrives in director Debbie Allen’s production of one of the writer’s best works is the drama’s musical conversationality and boisterous spirit. How could it not when the 1911 Pittsburgh boarding house it’s set in is run by Cedric the Entertainer?
He is smart casting for Seth, a sensible man who provides rooms at $2 a week for, broadly speaking, people in search of something: a missing wife, a job, a man. By design, the transient tenants with secrets are more intriguing than the steady proprietor.
But Cedric’s stand-up personality precedes him. And his funny glances, surprised entrances and one-liners give him as much presence as those with baggage and… more baggage.
Nobody bears as much of an emotional burden as Herald Loomis (Joshua Boone), a frightening livewire who arrives at the establishment in the Hill neighborhood with his 11-year-old daughter.
We first see his hatted silhouette ominously behind a frosted door window like a gunslinger entering a saloon.
That scary first impression does not mislead. Ghoulish aside from his temper, Herald is looking for his better half Martha, who he was separated from 11 years earlier. He’s endured a difficult past, which Bynum (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), a wise practitioner of folk magic, can quickly sense.
Boone’s Loomis is ferocious and plagued by his life’s unimaginable suffering. Growling at times, he’s all bark and bite. But, by no fault of the actor, the wanderer is where Allen’s revival wobbles.
There is an imbalance of warmth and darkness throughout the show — tilted heavily toward the former — which smothers the play’s power at vital moments. All of those involve Herald.
In part, that is because this director doesn’t easily express the animating contradiction of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”: that it’s both fresh-baked-biscuits natural and boldly mystical.
Those two sides collide at the end of Act 1 when Loomis starts alarmingly speaking in tongues and collapses to the ground writhing as if possessed.
It’s freaky. Or at least it could be. But Allen has the other characters noncommittally sway behind him, which calms the speech down by putting a cold compress on a fevered forehead. Later at the end of the play, a jolting confrontation with Herald that ends in profound spiritual release is, again, placidly staged.
There isn’t a discernible point of view or artful acknowledgement of the drama’s otherworldly qualities. It’s fine during comedic kitchen-table chitchat, but less assured elsewhere. The story is further pacified by David Gallo’s ho-hum set of hanging window frames and freestanding doors that feels built, much like the nomadic characters, to come and go.
Unfortunately one of the most frequent occupants of that lackluster first floor is Taraji P. Henson as Seth’s hardworking wife Bertha. Henson dials up her character’s energy to a level that’s frankly out of sync with this play and the rest of the actors in it. Maybe that’s to justify her strange final bow in a show that’s not remotely about her.
I have only praise for the supporting cast, though. Nimene Sierra Wureh’s Mattie, who seems always on the verge of tears, is touchingly hopeless as she begs Bynum to use his witchcraft to bring back a man who abandoned her. And Tripp Taylor charms — or perhaps is a lecherous creep — while his guitar-strumming Jeremy hits on all the ladies on the premises. As a religious woman with plenty of pain of her own, Abigail Onwunali is devastating in the end.
But, when it comes to August Wilson, nobody can top Santiago-Hudson, who has a decades-long history with the late writer and an ingrained understanding of his poetry. The words trip off his tongue like honey. His Bynum is perfection — nutty before revealing deep sagacity; comfortingly down-home and then shaman-esque; sweet and fiery. The actor is the soul of this production, and deftly escapes its failings.
