"Joe Turner's Come and Gone' in New York

I once heard the late Lloyd Richards, August Wilson's longtime friend and director, define a playwright as "a person who walks down the street and taps a stranger on the shoulder and says, "'Come to the theater tonight because I have something to say to you more important than anything else you might be doing'." With Lincoln Center's magnificent production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone, just opened on Broadway, August Wilson has tapped us on the shoulder.

For 24 years, Wilson pursued a remarkable project that he completed shortly before his untimely death in 2005: He wrote ten plays, each representing a decade in the African-American experience in the 20th Century. Joe Turner's Come and Gone takes place in 1911; thus it's the second installment in this Century Cycle, which in play after play elevates ordinary lives in Pittsburgh to Shakespearean heights.

Bartlett Sher, best known as a Tony-winning director of musicals (most recently South Pacific) is pitch-perfect here; he begins Joe Turner with the play's characters silhouetted against a huge sky, criss-crossing the stage in different directions. This is a play about people coming and going, the results of Southern blacks' migration northward; so it is set, suitably enough, in a boarding house where people stay only a week or two. The central character, Herald Loomis (Chad. L Coleman), is traveling with his daughter Zonia (Amari Rose Leigh) in search of his wife Martha (Danai Gurira). When asked where he's from, he replies, "Come from all over. Whichever way the road take us, that's the way we go."

A community, albeit briefly

The boarding house is run by Seth Holly (Ernie Hudson), a practical man who has no patience with "that heebie-jeebie stuff" practiced by Bynam (Roger Robinson), a mystical, wise, gravelly-voiced voodoo man. Bertha Holly (Latanya Richardson Jackson) is the mothering presence of the place, providing an endless supply of biscuits and grits to the other boarders— the young buck Jeremy (Andre Holland), the forlorn and twice-rejected Mattie (Marsha Stephanie Blake), and the hotstuff gold-digger Molly (Aunjanue Ellis).

This disparate group briefly becomes a community when, after the Sunday night fried chicken dinner, all the residents of the boarding house gather to "Juba down" in a thrilling scene of stomping, clapping and drumming. Into this wild African rejoicing enters Loomis, a man who is cruelly damaged by his seven years' captivity by Joe Turner (a de facto latter-day version of slavery). Loomis narrates a riveting and pain-filled vision of bones walking on the water.

A seamless ensemble

Rutherford Selig (Arliss Howard), a white peddler who makes extra money as a "people-finder" (that is, he's a proud descendant of slave traders and bounty hunters), is a superbly ferrety Faulknerian character who'll become the instrument of the plot— if this glorious collection of stories and memories and anecdotes and advice can be called a plot.

Just as the luminous cast forms a seamless ensemble, so the production team's work is all of a beautiful piece. Michael Yeargan's set is gorgeously minimalist, all warm and sturdy wood with magically materializing windows and tables. Taj Mahal's haunting music, Catherine Zuber's authentic costumes and Brian MacDevitt's dazzling lighting all contribute to this remarkable production. In Sher's hands, Wilson's evocation of a world filled with operatic longings and grudges mingles with the pots and pans of realism and provides an extraordinary theatrical experience.