Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), a play by August Wilson. [ Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 105 perf.; NYDCC Award.] At a boardinghouse in Pittsburgh in 1911, the intense African‐American Herald Loomis (Delroy Lindo) appears with his young daughter, claiming that he has escaped from the Mississippi bounty hunter Joe Turner and is seeking his wife who ran off ten years ago. After paying a dollar to a white “people finder,” Loomis is reunited with his wife (Angela Bassett) who has become a religious fanatic. To wash himself “in the blood of the Lord” and free himself from Joe Turner, Loomis slashes his chest open with a knife, then leaves his daughter with her mother. Perhaps the most engrossing aspect of the play, which was described by Newsday as “filled with strangeness and wonders of the unpredictable,” was the various boardinghouse residents who were written and acted vibrantly. The drama was revived Off Broadway in 1996.

The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.