STAGE: August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone

"It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911.... From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory.... They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow, crooked cobbles and the fiery blasts of the coke furnace a way of bludgeoning and shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth."

Lincoln Center Theater's newest production is the first Broadway revival of August Wilson's JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, by one of the country's most revered playwrights. Nominated for six Tony Awards in the 1988-89 season, JOE TURNER was named Best Play by the New York Drama Critics Circle.

August Wilson's JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE is set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Owners Seth and Bertha Holly play host to a makeshift family of people who come to stay, some for days, some longer, during the Great Migration of the 1910s when descendants of former slaves moved in large numbers from the South toward the industrial cities of the North, seeking new jobs, new lives and new beginnings. (source)

August Wilson's JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE opens today (4/14) and runs thru June 13 at:
Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th Street (Between Broadway and 6th Avenue)
New York NY 10036