Joe Turner was real. Brother of the Tennessee Governor, he would swoop down on Black men in the early 1900s – gambling, preaching, just walking down the road – and keep them enslaved on chain gangs for seven years. “They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone / Got my man and gone” – the women sang it, a blues lament that echoes through August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” But Wilson’s 1911 masterwork isn’t just about one man’s bondage; it’s about an entire people searching for their song – their identity, their purpose – in the aftermath of slavery during the Great Migration North. At Seth and Bertha Holly’s Pittsburgh boardinghouse, newly freed African Americans arrive “isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods,” carrying Bibles and guitars, searching for ways to reconnect and reassemble. Herald Loomis arrives searching for his wife Martha, but the rootworker Bynum Walker sees deeper: this is a man who’s forgotten his song. Debbie Allen’s devastating revival at the Barrymore Theatre, starring Taraji P. Henson and Cedric “The Entertainer,” makes clear that finding your song – finding yourself – means standing on your own, bleeding for yourself, refusing to let anyone bind you up.

It’s August 1911 in Pittsburgh, and Seth and Bertha Holly run a boardinghouse that becomes a way station for displaced souls. Cedric “The Entertainer” gives Seth a personality intolerant of mystical nonsense – particularly the “heebie-jeebie stuff” practiced by Bynum Walker (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), the rootworker and conjure man who serves as the household’s spiritual guide. Taraji P. Henson’s Bertha mediates between her husband’s skepticism and the deeper needs of their boarders, gently reprimanding Seth for his intolerance while wondering when he’ll return to working daytime. Into this world arrives Herald Loomis (Joshua Boone) with his eleven-year-old daughter Zonia (Savannah Commodore), paying for two weeks’ lodging while searching for his wife Martha. The other residents are searchers too, but their quests are more earthly: Mattie Campbell (Nimene Sierra Wureh) wants Bynum to help her find Jack Carper, the man who left her. Jeremy Furlow (Tripp Taylor) is looking for a woman and runs off with Molly Cunningham (Maya Boyd), the free-spirited twenty-something who refuses to be tied down. These searches are in stark contrast to Herald Loomis’s deeper spiritual quest – he’s not just looking for his wife; he’s looking for himself.

Loomis reveals his backstory: In 1901, he was a deacon in the Abundant Life Church, preaching to gamblers outside Memphis, when Joe Turner – brother of the Tennessee Governor – swooped down and captured him along with forty other Black men. What followed was seven years of forced labor, part of the convict leasing system that Douglas A. Blackmon documented in “Slavery by Another Name” – a neo-slavery that re-enslaved Black Americans after the Civil War. Turner kept men for exactly seven years, then released them on his birthday. When Loomis returned in 1908, his wife Martha was gone, having left their daughter Zonia with her mother and fled North. For four years, Loomis has been searching – not just for Martha, but for himself, for a “starting place in the world” after Joe Turner stole his song.

Joshua Boone brings passionate authenticity to Herald Loomis, a man distrusted by Seth Holly from his first appearance. When Rutherford Selig (Bradley Stryker), the white peddler known as the “People Finder,” finally locates Martha (Abigail Onwunali), the confrontation crackles with spiritual warfare. Martha, now working with an Evangelist church, insists Loomis must “look to Jesus” and “be washed with the blood of the lamb.” But Boone’s Loomis rejects salvation through Christ’s sacrifice. In a moment of shattering self-realization, he slashes his own chest with a knife, rubbing the blood over his face, and declares: “I’m standing! I’m standing. My legs stood up!” Boone makes clear this isn’t madness but liberation – Loomis bleeding for himself, finding his song, refusing to let anyone else’s blood save him. As Bynum proclaims, “Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!” – Boone achieves transcendence through self-sufficiency, not submission. Wilson asks the question at the heart of the play: Who gets to define your salvation – you, or someone else? What is the difference between being saved and being free?

Debbie Allen’s deft direction allows the characters and their conflicts to drive the narrative forward, drawing audiences into the action with a keen eye for staging. Allen stages the crucial Juba dance around the kitchen as a call-and-response ritual reminiscent of the ring shouts of African slaves. The dance is energetic and animated with references to the Holy Ghost, building toward Loomis’s breakdown when he challenges Bynum about the importance of the Holy Ghost. The bones vision follows – Bynum assists Loomis to articulate his terrifying Middle Passage vision of bones rising from the ocean, walking on water, then being washed ashore with flesh. The strength of both scenes is heightened by physical theater – Boone’s Loomis convulsing with palpable anguish, possessed by the vision – lighting and sound effects, and meticulously staged movement that makes the spiritual tangible.

David Gallo’s expansive boarding house set looms large in grays and shadows, dramatically lit by Stacey Derosier to evoke both the weight of history and the possibility of rebirth. Paul Tazewell’s period costumes ground the characters in 1911 while communicating class and status, allowing their archetypal power to resonate across time, and Justin Ellington’s sound design further supports Allen’s staging, particularly in the Juba dance and bones vision sequences.

Looking at the body of August Wilson’s work, it is important to recognize that his plays focus unflinchingly on the Black experience in America. Like Suzan-Lori Parks’s work, which also centers the Black experience, the themes of “Joe Turner” resonate across cultures and ethnicities – the search for identity, the need to remember what has been erased, the struggle for agency in a world that denies it. But at the heart of Wilson’s entire corpus is the specific struggle of Black Americans to reconnect after the scattering of slavery and the Great Migration, to find a “starting place in the world” when everything familiar has been stripped away. Wilson’s characters search for their song – that essential identity that cannot be taken by Joe Turner’s chain gang or diluted by white Christian salvation. They demand to be seen, to be remembered, to stand on their own feet and bleed for themselves. Like Parks’s “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,” where Black Woman pleads “Re-member me” – literally asking to be put back together after being scattered by violence and erasure – Wilson’s Herald Loomis undergoes the same re-membering, re-assembling himself from bones washed ashore, finding the song that makes him whole. Both playwrights understand that self-sufficiency – standing on your own, bleeding for yourself – is the only path to true liberation.

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is essential theater that shows why this 1986 play set in 1911 still matters urgently in 2026. The historical context Wilson explores – the convict leasing system that Douglas A. Blackmon documented, the neo-slavery that continued long after emancipation – resonates painfully with contemporary mass incarceration and systemic racism. Wilson asks enduring questions about identity, displacement, and self-determination that speak directly to our moment. Debbie Allen’s powerhouse revival, anchored by extraordinary performances from Taraji P. Henson, Cedric “The Entertainer,” Joshua Boone, and Ruben Santiago-Hudson, delivers Wilson’s masterwork with devastating clarity and urgent relevance. This is a production that demands to be seen – not just as great theater, but as necessary witness to a history that refuses to stay buried.