Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Written by	August Wilson
Date premiered	1984
Place premiered	Eugene O'Neill Theater Center Waterford, Connecticut
Original language	English
Series	The Pittsburgh Cycle
Subject	the lives of spirited boarders in a lodging house
Genre	Drama
Setting	Seth Holly's boardinghouse in Pittsburgh in 1911

Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a play by American playwright August Wilson. It is the second installment of his decade-by-decade chronicle of the African-American experience, The Pittsburgh Cycle. The play was first staged 1984 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut and opened on Broadway on 27 March 1988 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre—running for 105 performances. Directed by Lloyd Richards, the cast included Delroy Lindo as Herald Loomis and television and movie star Angela Bassett, as Loomis's wife, Martha.

The original working title of the play was Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket, the title of a painting by Romare Bearden. The title Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a line from the refrain of "Joe Turner", an early blues song.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone is the second in a series of August Wilson's The Century Cycle, which chronicled the struggles and lives of African Americans in the 20th century. Joe Turner's Come and Gone is set in the second decade of the 20th century and chronicles the lives of a few freed former enslaved African Americans in the North and deals with the conflicts of racism and discrimination.

Scene one - Set in the 1910s, the audience is introduced to Seth Holly's boardinghouse, where Seth and his wife Bertha are in the kitchen watching Bynum in the backyard. Seth is complaining to Bertha about Bynum's strange spiritual activities. Bertha tells Seth to let him be as he isn’t bothering anyone. They also talk about Jeremy, a young man staying in the boardinghouse, getting arrested the night before for supposedly being drunk in public. Seth then has a monologue about the poor situation that the freed slaves are in after traveling up North. He worries that the African Americans are too naïve and that all the promises of jobs in the North will be taken by the poor white Americans. Then Rutherford Selig, the People Finder, comes to order dustpans from Seth, a maker of pots and pans. Then Bynum talks about an adventure that he once took up river where he found the "shiny man", a man he found on the road that offered to explain to him the Secret of Life. He had a spiritual encounter with the man, and sees the ghost of his father, telling him to find his song in life. His song, he later explains, is the Binding Song, which he uses to bind people to one another. Selig leaves and Jeremy enters, and after getting a scolding from Seth, he tells him that the white cops came and picked him up for no reason and that he was, in fact, not drunk at all. Then Herald Loomis and his daughter Zonia enter, looking for a place to stay for the week. They reveal that he is looking for his wife, Martha. After Seth shows them to their room, Jeremy relates a story about his guitar-playing abilities and how he is wary of playing for white men or money because of a bad experience. Bynum convinces Jeremy to go down to a bar to play for some money. Seth confides in Bynum and Bertha his lack of confidence in Loomis, and thinks that he is a "mean looking" man and he doesn’t want to help him find his wife because of it. After this Mattie Campbell enters, looking for Bynum because she has heard that he can "fix things". Her man, Jack, has up and left her, but she wants him to come back. Bynum tells her that he can only bind people that wish to be bound; that she is better off just letting him find his own path in life. Jeremy intervenes and suggests that Mattie stays with him as to cure both of their loneliness. The scene ends with Zonia and Reuben, the little boy from next door. Reuben discloses Bynum's odd tendencies to Zonia and tells her a story about his friend Eugene that used to sell pigeons to Bynum so he could use their blood in his rituals.

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