'Joe Turner's Come and Gone'

“I poured my life into a cracked jar, and it all leaked out the bottom.” On the heels of critically acclaimed A Noise Within productions of Gem of the Ocean, Seven Guitars, Radio Golf, King Hedley II and The Piano Lesson, director Gregg T. Daniel returns to direct August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: the second play in Wilson’s extraordinary 10-play “American Century Cycle” and the sixth in A Noise Within’s commitment to stage them all. Performances begin October 18 and continue at the company’s Pasadena home through November 9. Previews begin October 12.

Set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911 during the Great Migration, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone introduces us to a group of men and women teetering on the brink as they search for lost family, identity and purpose in the aftermath of slavery. Owners Seth Holly and his wife, Bertha play host to a makeshift family, as residents come and go during a time when descendants of former slaves were moving North in large numbers. When tormented Herald Loomis arrives with his young daughter, Zonia, he is a free man after seven years’ hard labor on Joe Turner’s chain gang. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind, believing she can help him reclaim his identity. But through his encounters with the rootmaker, Bynum, and the other residents, he comes to realize that what he really needs is to “find his song” — and it will take more than the local people finder to discover it.

“Seth and Bertha’s boarding house is a way station where souls come on their way to find redemption,” explains Daniel. “Thousands of former slaves and their descendants moved from the South into the jungles of the northern cities after the end of the Civil War. They needed to find each other, to reconnect with their heritage, their ancestry and their culture.

As in all of Wilson’s plays, a recurring motif in Joe Turner is the complex relationship between Christianity and African mysticism.

“I would like [audiences] to leave the theater with the understanding that the Black characters they see in the play are African people,” Wilson once said in an interview. “And that as African people, they have a different cultural response to the world than do white people. In fact, that is the source of their strength. So, if white or Black audiences are seeing the play, if it dawns on them at some time during the play that these are African people, then they begin to see the commonalities of different cultures. And they understand, even though these are African people, they wrestle with the same questions that all of humanity wrestles with. Why God got to be so big?”

Taken as a whole, the ten plays in Wilson’s monumental cycle span a period of 90 years, from Gem of the Ocean in 1904 to Radio Golf in 1997 — with nine of them set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where Wilson himself grew up. But the plays were not written sequentially and are not connected in the manner of a serial story. Each play stands alone.

Performances of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone take place October 18 through November 9 on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays 7:30 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinees every Saturday and Sunday (no matinee on Saturday, Oct. 19). Four preview performances take place at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 12, and at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 15; Thursday, Oct. 16; and Friday, Oct. 17.

A one-hour INsiders Discussion Group will take place prior to the matinee on Sunday, Oct. 19 beginning at 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 25 at 7:30 p.m. is “Black Out Night,” an opportunity for an audience self-identifying as Black to experience the performance together; tickets include a post-show reception (non-Black-identifying patrons are welcome to attend, or to select a different performance). Post-performance conversations with the artists will take place every Friday (except the preview) and on Sunday, Oct. 26. GalaPro closed captioning is available at select performances, courtesy of the Perenchio Foundation. Student matinees are scheduled on select weekdays at 10:30 a.m.; interested educators should email education@anoisewithin.org.

Tickets to Joe Turner’s Come and Gone start at $51.50 (including fees). Student tickets start at $20. Tickets to the previews on Wednesday, Oct. 15 and Thursday, Oct. 16 will be Pay What You Choose starting at $10 (available online beginning at noon the Monday prior, and at the box office beginning at 2 p.m. on the day of the performance) Discounts are available for groups of 10 or more.

A Noise Within is located at 3352 E Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91107. For more information and to purchase tickets, call (626) 356-3100 or go to www.anoisewithin.org.