Carson Klamert
A rehearsal scene.
Quanda Johnson, left, Dwight Hicks, foreground, and Charls Hall, far right, are among the cast rehearsing 'Joe Turner's Come and Gone' at University Theatre.
Baron Kelly’s favorite August Wilson play is Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. The actor, director and UW-Madison professor of theater and drama believes this work, the second play in “The Pittsburgh Cycle,” Wilson’s chronicle of the African American experience, is Wilson’s masterpiece. In one drama, the playwright combines all the elements of his other works.
“I was overwhelmed by Lloyd Richards’ [1988] New York production, and the blending of African spirituality with Christian religion,” Kelly tells Isthmus. He’s wanted to stage it for some time, having begun with Fences, the first play in the cycle, in 2023.
The University Theatre production of the play opens Feb. 27 and runs through March 9. Kelly directs and stars as Herald Loomis, who has escaped horrific events in the South.
In addition, Kelly has recruited a cast of A-list talent rarely seen in Madison, including Dwight Hicks, Quanda Johnson, Charls Sedgwick Hall, and Wisconsin Public Radio’s Norman Gilliland.
“I want to do plays that speak to me and I wondered if I could get the cast for this play, if the student population could ‘people’ the play,” says Kelly, noting that UW-Madison is “primarily a white institution, with only 3.14% of students and maybe 75 staff and faculty identifying as African American.” The cast ultimately included several UW students and two students from Madison’s Tokay Middle School.
Sixty years after Emancipation, the Great Migration is in full swing in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Characters escape the South only to experience degradation in the North. The setting is a Pittsburgh boarding house run by Seth Holly, played by Dwight Hicks.
Hicks wants the university and community audience to take in Wilson’s storytelling. “This is a historical story from a Black perspective,” he says. “I hope they listen and discover that hundreds of years of history and challenges later, this struggle continues. This history is every American immigrant’s history.”
The play layers the African American story of the Great Migration with the impact of generations of people torn from home time and time again.Wilson writes of the spirit in this play — the spirit of the man who can find no home and has lost his people and his song. It’s a classic immigration tale, and yet it evolves from a people who never chose to immigrate, but were taken from their homelands to become the first mechanized labor of the new world.
“Wilson focuses on the Africanisms that were eroding from African American culture in his plays,” actor Quanda Johnson, who plays Seth’s wife, Bertha Holly, tells Isthmus. “We’re losing those historical essences — language, the poetic cadence, the signifying, the ring shout — that is part of African American vernacular. [Wilson] calls out that we are people of the earth, as all aboriginals are. Wilson is crafting a homeplace for us.”
Charls Sedgwick Hall plays Bynum Walker, a root worker who uses “hoodoo” and root vegetables to create spiritual totems to help his community resolve their life problems “after they have been torn from their people time and time again,” says Hall, who pulled from his own spirituality for this role — “my personal faith and belief in humankind.”
Tickets are available here or at the Mitchell Theatre box office in Vilas Hall.
