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Earlier this year, Viola Davis excitedly quoted August Wilson’s play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, while announcing Michael B Jordan’s Oscar win. “You are shining, Herald Loomis,” she beamed, “shining like new money!” It was a touching acknowledgment of the actor’s long-awaited recognition, and the glory that awaits him. For most of Wilson’s 1911-set piece, Loomis is a man weary from an endless walk through the shadow of the valley of death, his spirit all but broken by systemic racism. Salvation is hardly guaranteed, but flickers in the distance.
So it goes in Debbie Allen’s uneven Broadway staging, the play’s third since its 1984 premiere. Part of his monumental Century Cycle of 10 plays representing each decade of the 20th-century Black American experience, Wilson’s play has undeniable lyricism but needs pitch-perfect direction to make its magical realism sing. Its Pittsburgh boardinghouse setting is suitably liminal – halfway between north and south, stability and transience – and none who pass through are more than a generation removed from the horrors of slavery. Wilson reflects on this dizzying flashpoint by refracting his characters’ mysticism, religion and worldliness, honoring each even as they collide.
Homeowners Seth and Bertha Holly (Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P Henson) are on the earthier side; she tends house while he does metalwork in their shed and wonders what on earth their older boarder, Bynum (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) is doing with all those dead pigeons in their yard. Bynum’s deeply spiritual life makes him come across like an old coot, talking about apparitions and “binding songs” which can tie people together. He’s built quite the reputation, though, and the young Mattie (Nimene Sierra Wureh) comes asking him for help finding her runaway lover. When Bynum informs her that binding requires two-way consent, Jeremy (Tripp Taylor), a guitar-playing construction worker, sways Mattie into sharing his room at the house instead.
The atmosphere so far is largely comedic, though weighted by recent generational trauma. Enter Herald Loomis (Joshua Boone), lights dimmed and thunder booming, and the production begins its struggle to convince us of its otherworldliness. Loomis and daughter Zonia (Savannah Commodore or Dominique Skye Turner, alternating performances) require a room while he searches for his estranged wife, and his presence is immediately discomfiting to the residents. Oscar-winning costumier Paul Tazewell outfits him in a slick, dark coat and murderous wide-brimmed hat, but it’s the wrong choice. Though Boone plays his high-simmering dread very well, Allen makes too much of the character’s menace and, from then on, anything that doesn’t directly involve the ticking timebomb upstairs becomes insignificant.
This is a problem in an ensemble piece brimming with rigorous world-building. There’s Selig (Bradley Stryker), a white man who sells Seth’s wares and has a “people finding” side gig with a distressing family history; the sultry Molly (Maya Boyd), who takes a room after missing her train away from home; and Reuben (Jackson Edward Davis or Christopher Woodley), the cheeky neighbor’s kid. These are all notes in Wilson’s larger symphony, but play one too insistently and the rest feel like misdirection.
Allen’s staging doesn’t match the fine work she’s drawn from her actors, who are mostly confined to the kitchen table far stage left. This leaves the rest of the house – a cozy living room and a stairway that seems to climb toward heaven – frustratingly unexplored. (The set design, by longtime Wilson collaborator David Gallo, does handsomely capture the play’s twilight zone; its well-appointed rooms against a black backdrop that reveals a terrifying and exciting industrial world.)
The searching (Loomis) and the searcher (Bynum) at the crux of the play are done well by the nervy Boone and, especially, the authoritative Santiago-Hudson. (Imagine Santiago-Hudson being anything less than transcendent, let alone in an August Wilson play.) Cedric and Henson, despite their marquee titles, have more recessive roles, though ones they excel at with ease. In her Broadway debut, Henson transmits her screen presence’s instant charisma, and Cedric imbues the curmudgeonly Seth with the insightful exasperation of a born comedian.
Minutes from the final curtain, a new character is introduced and a star (Abigail Onwunali) is born. With fierce command of her character, her role within Wilson’s expansive play and epochal oeuvre, Onwunali storms in and, suddenly, his historic reach for salvation is here.
