Sitting in the audience for Portland Playhouse‘s profound production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone this past weekend, I was struck by the significance of the fact that Portland Playhouse received notice just as the show was opening that the National Endowment for the Arts had pulled $25,000 in promised grant funding. 

Like a host of other projects that received similar notices that day, Portland Playhouse’s production purportedly doesn’t meet identified “priorities” of the Trump Administration to “focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”  Hmm.

I don’t know of a play that better reflects the nation’s rich artistic heritage than this one, by any remotely reasonable criteria. Indeed, that the production faced such a side swipe at opening represents another of the ongoing efforts to erase stories of Black Americans — their songs, in this play’s conception — efforts that are the central concern of this particular play.

Like the characters in this transcendent work of theater, Portland Playhouse has persisted: It has dug as deep as required — ever more deeply — to build on the spiritual legacy of a rich artistic heritage that continues to require such persistence.

The play is part of the ten-play cycle written by the great August Wilson reflecting Black stories set in Pittsburgh during each decade of the 20^th century. If it isn’t already clear, one should never miss an opportunity to experience a solid production of any of the plays in the cycle, and Portland Playhouse has already demonstrated its bona fides in several productions, including, most recently, its excellent 2014 production of The Piano Lesson (which lives in my memory still) and its gorgeous 2018 production of Fences. 

The latter, like this production of Joe Turner, was directed by Lou Bellamy, who is the founding artistic director of Penumbra Theater Company in Minneapolis, the theater that has mounted the most productions of August Wilson’s work. 

In Bellamy’s practiced hands, and featuring a strong cast whose members bring their most soulful work, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone pulses with underground wisdom. 

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It’s set in a boarding house in 1911, its inhabitants embodying varying stances for navigating an officially post-slavery world that is, at best, only intermittently emancipated. Spirituality is a touchstone for these differences; Wilson is inviting us to witness how each character makes sense of a world in which terrible evil persists. 

Seth Holly, the boardinghouse proprietor (an excellent and sure-footed Bobby Bermea), has little sympathy for what he views as the spiritual excesses of others. In his mind, the world is navigable if you stay within the lines and take a fully practical approach. He is inclined to explain unfairness as the fault of the victim; one won’t end up in jail if he doesn’t stay out late, and if someone demands a piece of one’s wages, one should turn it over and be thankful for what one has left. 

The practicality of Seth’s wife of 25 years, Bertha Holly (Ramona Lisa Alexander, all warmth with a twinkle in her watchful eye), includes navigating her husband’s frequent intolerance; she gently moderates him, offering consolation and warm biscuits, and sees no harm in indulging in whatever spiritual practices may ward off evil.

One of their long-term boarders is Bynum Walker, played by the great Lester Purry, a veteran of many August Wilson productions, including Portland Playhouse’s 2018 production of Fences. Bynum is practical in a different sense than the Hollys; though he speaks in what may seem like circular riddles and stories, Bynum is comfortable navigating the world of the spiritual, and not purely the version of Christianity that the white world has found useful in managing Black folks. 

Bynum makes no secret of his pursuit of deeper truth, including what he terms the song given to him by his own father.  A variety of characters, including some of the boarders, come to Bynum for help, and his exchanges draw from worlds beyond the conventional, including African spirituality.  Bynum is the holder of ways of knowing that work, whatever their source.

Into this world wanders Herald Loomis and his young daughter Zonia. How people respond to Loomis’s apparent brokenness is one of the touchstones of the play. Loomis is bent, rarely meets anyone’s eyes, his face partly covered by a hat and his body covered, even in hot weather, with a large overcoat. He identifies himself as a deacon (perhaps harkening to what formerly gave him legitimacy in the world) and indicates that he is looking for a wife from whom he has long been separated. Seth views him with immediate suspicion, as though brokenness itself is dangerous. Bertha is more generous, focusing on Loomis’s inarguably innocent child. 

Bynum’s interactions with Loomis are central to the play. Bynum navigates the world with purpose, and that purpose is consistent but not always obvious. After one particularly fraught interaction, Seth is grateful to Bynum for mitigating what he sees as Loomis’s intolerable excesses. Bynum has a different view of the meaning of the interaction. The mysteries of Bynum and Loomis build until a final reveal at the play’s conclusion.

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If you haven’t seen this miraculous play, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But this production also benefits from a powerful performance by La’Tevin Alexander, doing perhaps his best work yet, as Herald Loomis.  He holds in his body the suffering of the exploited who have somehow not been fully killed; he has retained the will to search, his quest fueled by knowing without understanding. 

Having been held in bondage decades after slavery was legal, Loomis has lost everything, including, as Bynum would put it, his song. He chooses not to look away from the import of his losses, but to pursue what reconciliation he can see to pursue, even as he evokes fear and revulsion even in what should be his own community. It’s a heavy lift, and a moving portrayal of the sort of devastation that continues to materialize around us. How do we respond to suffering and brokenness? What tools are available to assist? What can healing look like?

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone offers a way to wrestle with these questions, and this cast and the production artists have given everything to the effort. Once again, Portland Playhouse’s location inside what was formerly a Black church in Portland opens a space for some deep spiritual wrestling. It’s time for that now, and those of us who can approach a rich artistic heritage with reverence are privileged to participate.

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Joe Turner’s Come and Gone continues through June 8 at Portland Playhouse, 602 N.E. Prescott St, Portland. For ticket and schedule information, look here.