A Friday Flash

I'm running a tad short on funds, so the reviews will probably come in a 'few and far between' kind of way for the time being (though, after saying that, I am seeing something tonight and I think I have something next week, but considering it's Tony nomination season, I don't have much booked).  I'll probably be catching up on my television viewing.  Recently, I greatly enjoyed the PBS American Masters piece on August Wilson, The Ground on Which I Stand.  If it pops up on your local PBS station, I highly recommend it.  You may recall that I'm an enormous fan of August Wilson's work - after seeing the documentary, I was especially nostalgic for his plays.  I wish there could be a revival of one of them every season somewhere in New York (I'm especially pulling for a revival of Jitney, which is the only one I've never seen performed).  When looking through old reviews, I found this review from six years ago today (which hardly seems possible).  I thought it made sense to flash back to it now...


4/10/2009:  Hi everybody!  I was lucky enough to get a free ticket to last night’s performance of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, presented by Lincoln Center Theatre.  I give the play a huge thumbs-up, though it wasn’t the transcendent experience it could’ve been, in my opinion, due to one of the central performances.
Like most of Wilson’s work, the play is beautifully specific yet completely universal in the world it creates.  Joe Turner is set in 1911, in a Pittsburgh rooming house.  The set is wonderfully evocative with realistic and impressionistic touches in the same space.  The physical production is just lovely, with a spectacular effect at the end.

The acting is all very good, too, except I just couldn’t relate to the performance choices of one of the actors.  The central character Herald Loomis is described by the other characters as ‘possessed,’  ‘not quite right,’ ‘always staring at everybody,’ but the actor playing him has confused monotone and flat with otherworldly and strange.  Even in the scenes where he cautiously tries to come out of his self-imposed shell, this actor speaks with the same boring cadences.  And at the end, which should be a revelatory freeing moment, he’s still monotone.  So even though the wonderful dialogue and gorgeous stagecraft is getting my heart racing, the performance is pushing me back down.  I never felt the tightly coiled rage the character talks about, so I found the hole this actor created at the center of the piece extremely disappointing.  I don’t know--perhaps I saw him on an off night.

The other actors, most especially Roger Robinson as Bynum, the old hoodoo man, are spot on.  I was happy to see a young actor I loved in an Off-Broadway show a few years ago give another terrific performance.  One of the great things about an August Wilson play, I feel, is how lived-in the dialogue seems and how you immediately get to know the characters.  There’s quite a bit of what I call ‘speechifying,’ but the speeches are gorgeous, like Shakespeare, and they draw you in completely.  The three hours you spend in their company completely fly by.

So I highly recommend you see the show—maybe the acting that bothered me won’t bother you.  But you should see it because this is a stellar production of a terrific play by a vitally important playwright.  In my humble opinion.