Both a Wail and a Whelp of Joy

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In the ancient archetype of the spiritual quest, the focus is almost exclusively on the itinerary of a solitary journeyer. Eastern wisdom traditions have long advocated for a path of solitude, isolation, self sacrifice, meditation. Models from the Western literary canon take a different route but they also feature an essentially solo journeyer: Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

As strong as those traditions continue to be, a more inclusive view of how we define spirituality, wisdom and consciousness itself is emerging in our current era. Who we are is not as easily boundaried off into discrete entities as it may have been in the past, and science is supporting this more inclusive view. Turns out, collective consciousness is real. Thinkers like David Abrams have taken that boundary busting even further, describing a more-than-human world, one in which animals, plants, and places are all part of our collective consciousness.

August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a play about seeking and searching. Set in a boarding house in Pittsburgh in 1911 during the period of the Great Migration, most of the characters are in transit from various states of their lives. Unlike the domestic settings of many of Wilson’s other plays, this is an ad hoc community of strangers who find commonalities and connections with each other. Each person’s spiritual quest is framed in the poetic notion of finding one’s own song, the way you can “figure out the secret of your life on your own.” In this Bardo-like setting, nomadic questers come into contact with an otherworldly presence, Bynum Walker. Part community elder, part visionary, part mystic, part voodoo priest, part healer, part connector, he knows the vital importance of finding one’s own song.

While that search is personal and must be embraced by each individual, this quest is not framed in the old archetype of a soul’s solitary striving. This is a play about community, interconnectedness, the collective.

From a powerful essay by Sandy Alexandre included in the program:

Wilson consistently and beautifully dramatizes his opinion that ‘community is the most valuable thing…in African-American culture.’ It will come as no surprise to us how vital a role the community ends up playing in restoring the main character, Herald Loomis, back to himself, his song, and his life’s purpose—a unity of three essentially interchangeable things.

This community that has assembled itself randomly is one that demonstrates how important it is to be creative, gentle and generous in healing the broken parts of each other’s lives. Wilson brings the audience deep into this mélange of souls through the steady humor and a heart-centered narratives of loss, recovery and restoration. It all comes with a blend of pain and joy. In Wilson’s words, Loomis’s discovery of his own song is “both a wail and a whelp of joy.”

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone speaks to both the importance of both finding your own song and doing it in the community of others. This blend of the personal and the collective is also evident in the non solipsistic way Wilson approached his own writing and creative life. He often referred to the “the four Bs” that were the major influences on his writing: blues music, the Argentine  writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges,  the playwright Amiri Baraka and the painter Romare Bearden. 

In Wilson’s words:

From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don’t write political plays. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.

Romare Bearden’s 1978 collage, Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, inspired Wilson to write Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

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What a great success this is. There is so much to recommend this production of a play that first premiered at the Huntington Theater 36 years ago. The direction by Lili-Ann Brown is masterful, muscular and clear. Her exceptional cast—Maurice Emmanuel Parent as Seth Holly, Shannon Lamb as Bertha Holley, Robert Cornelius as Bynum Walker, James Milford as Herald Loomis, to name a few–brings this era to life with verve, humor and depth.

And what a pleasure to be back in a beautifully renovated Huntington Theater after its long closure!

Brown has spoken about the lessons learned during the pandemic and its impact on how our stories are being shared. In speaking about her approach to this play, she said, “I feel like I’m at the boarding house asking people: ‘What’s your journey been like? Where did you come from? How did you make it?” Those are questions we should continue to ask each other, always.

Meanwhile the monumental impact Wilson has had on bringing the stories and lives of African Americans into focus is enormous. The brilliance of his storytelling, like a rising tide, affects everyone, African Americans as well as others. The poignancy of his message and the depth of humanity he offers are not confined by cultural context or racial identity. The universality that is so present in his work comes from his intimacy with reality and what is personal to every human being.

We have been given a very special place to understand things larger than ourselves, all the time, intuitively sometimes, and sometimes through exertion. Buddha, for example, went through all kinds of processes—hunger, torture, everything—to get knowledge, and finally decided that those were not the paths by which he could be enlightened. So he adopted the path of life, and concluded that wisdom and Enlightenment are not based on staying away from reality but on staying very close to reality and, at the same time, trying to understand it.

Natvar Bhavsar

Don’t miss it. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone runs through November 13.