Watching Joe Turner the second time around was just as emotional and powerful and breathtaking as the first. How could this play's Broadway run NOT get extended. I hope the visit by the Obamas last night would help in that cause. The ensemble of actors are all Tony-worthy and I'm sad that more didn't get nominated.
August Wilson is a master and his place in the canon that includes Shakespeare, must be. The poetry and musicality of his language is so beautiful and just gets you at that visceral level in the way that, well I guess, great music and poetry does. That musicality informs the differences between each character and what each represents, creating a rich and colorful tapestry. And Wilson even addresses this musicality in plot... in that it is a story about people finding their song. It's a world of wandering souls trying to find someone, something... oneself. On a quest. But more than as a thematic device, it is rooted in history, of the Great Migration and all the pained history that it entails. This work can serve as a historical document and further demonstrates how the history of slavery in this country and the aftermath, should and can never be forgotten.
This story of folks looking for each other reminds me of my mom's childhood war stories, and other stories of war and holocaust worldwide. The images. The kinds of repetitive questions asked and the answers to those specific questions that come to define one's life. The wandering. The search. A kind of spell. And when people find each other, what is talked about... the details of how it came to be that they missed each other on that fateful day, always said in a manner of disbelief. Dreamlike.
As a component of history, Wilson tugs at the underbelly of the human condition, the story of power by the disempowerment of another, the story of Joe Turner, someone who was physically strong and didn't "need" the labor, but kidnapped black men and held them captive for years, and you can imagine him chipping away to break them down, all just because he could. What is it that feeds this desire? By stealing someone else's song, someone else's soul, on a lustful mission to gain power for its own sake... an empty pursuit of god-hood, an expression of pure evil.
Bynam Walker played by Roger Robinson, is just a delight. His craft is seamless that you can't imagine he is not in real life, what you see on stage... a quirky old medicine man. He has some of the most wise and lyrical lines in the play. Harold Loomis played by Chad L. Coleman, takes the tortured journey through the duration of this play through to liberation. The vulnerability, the anguish. And my homie Aunjanue Ellis who plays the cynical Molly Cunningham, who in a look, can eat up a lover and spit him out... but you can see, she is capable of loving more than anyone and would have the farthest to fall. There is a secret hope for a love that spans the globe, that'll transcend the banalities of daily life.
As if the play wasn't enough, the Obamas were in the house and what a magical night it was as a result. Imagine, getting to perform your art in front of this president. Just cutting through the Times Square crowd, getting to the theater block, getting inside the theater through airport security being wanded in, was an odyssey, and further fueled the anticipation of seeing the President. Typically indifferent New Yorkers were so geeked out by Obama's presence and Meryl Streep, who was seated a few rows ahead of the Obamas, was all but invisible when ordinarily she would be "the event" as a theater audience member. When Barack and Michelle walked into the theater, we were all on our feet, on chairs, cheering. It was unforgettable.
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