STAGE REVIEW : ‘Turner’ Paints a Portrait of Pain

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Old Globe Theatre is important as an example of the networking that’s going on among American theaters--this is the original Yale Rep production, staged by Lloyd Richards--and as the third panel in playwright August Wilson’s ongoing mural of black life, decade by decade, in the 20th Century. As a play it left this viewer fretful, as when a friend recounts an incident that obviously had enormous emotional repercussions for him--and you, the listener, only half-understand its significance. Something hasn’t been communicated.

What is perfectly clear is that Wilson has created another major role for a black actor who has the power to swing it, and that Delroy Lindo is that actor. Just as James Earl Jones made Wilson’s “Fences” a hit, “Joe Turner” should make Lindo a star.

As with “Fences,” this is the portrait of a strong man in pain. In “Fences,” set in the ‘50s, it was the dull ache of lost opportunity, something the hero hadn’t let stop him from having a life, if not the life he had earned.

But “Joe Turner,” set in 1911, concerns a man in constant torment--and in constant motion. Lindo’s character is searching the world for his wife, who wasn’t there when he returned home after 7 years of virtual slavery to a man named Joe Turner.

There actually was a Joe Turner. The Old Globe program describes him as the brother of a Tennessee governor, who would lure black men into roadside crap games and force them to work on his plantation. It’s helpful information, because the play leaves the hero’s entrapment so unspecific that “Joe Turner” might be a mythical monster, like Polyphemus in “The Odyssey.”

If we knew more about the crap game in question, maybe we’d understand that guilt is part of the reason the hero can’t rest. However, this is certainly sensed in Lindo’s performance. There’s no sense that his reconciliation with his wife will be a happy one. In fact there’s a strong possibility that it will be a fatal one. But until it happens, there’ll be no life for him.

The play does end with bloodshed, but it’s not the kind in Wilson’s ‘20s play, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” The blood here is sacramental, as a Christian would say. But the religion that calls the tune in this play is African.

The setting is a boarding house, or rather a private home that takes in boarders. The head of the house (Mel Winkler) thinks the old African superstitions are nonsense. A black man gets ahead by putting his vegetables in on time and by selling his tinware to the right bidder.

As if to underline what a respectable home this is, designer Scott Bradley provides an intensely tidy set: well-swept kitchen, rigid parlor. Mumbo Jumbo wouldn’t seem to be welcome here.

Yet it has its place. The family’s star boarder (Ed Hall) messes around with juju in the back yard, and is sought for advice and magic spells by people in trouble. And the family remembers the old African ring dances--the fun of a “juba” session, with everybody clapping and hollering in the kitchen.

But it’s not fun when Lindo’s shadowy man goes berserk at one of these sessions, as if all the devils inside him had suddenly broken lose. Hall has to talk him back down to earth, and the head of the house informs him that he’ll be moving out by the weekend.

The play’s most interesting aspect is its ability to combine an extremely hardheaded attitude toward life--best exemplified by Kimberly Scott as a female boarder who knows exactly what she wants and exactly how to get it--with the sense that, someplace, juju is right: There are spirits, forces, out there that have to be placated.

At its biggest moments, then, it feels like a tragedy in the old mode: the story of a giant on the rack. Lindo in his long overcoat and dented hat is a kind of Prometheus, and his suffering will go on until the appointed time--which might bring something even worse.

We believe it generally, thanks to Lindo’s massive performance and also thanks to Michael Giannitti’s lighting, which can turn an ordinary kitchen into a room you would rather not enter.

There are also times when we feel the strain toward myth more than the power of myth. Wilson has a taste for grandiose dialogue: The play would do well to purge all sentences containing the word “life,” “time” and “love.”

They are especially unfortunate in the mouth of Ed Hall as the mojo man. Hall has the prosaic outside of the role, but the mystery within--the possibility that this man really can work miracles, that he really does know everything about Lindo’s past--is never tapped. We can’t be shaken by this play until we see him as being just as powerful, under that small-time front, as our hero.

The plot, too, presents problems. Why didn’t Lindo’s mother-in-law tell him where his wife (Angela Bassett) had gone, when when he went to pick up their child (Kimme Stephanson)? It’s not a play where one wants to nit-pick, but Richards’ production doesn’t have the power to sweep you away to the point where you can’t.

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is a major play, but part of it escaped this viewer Thursday night, and may escape this particular staging. There will be others.

‘JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE’

The Yale Repertory Theatre production of August Wilson’s play, at the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego. Director Lloyd Richards. Scenic designer Scott Bradley. Costumes Pamela Peterson. Lighting Michael Giannitti. Musical director Dwight D. Andrews. Stage manager Karen L. Carpenter. Assistant stage manager Deirdre Fudge. With Mel Winkler, L. Scott Caldwell, Ed Hall, Raynor Scheine, Bo Rucker, Delroy Lindo, Kimme Stephanson, Tre’ Doxley, Kimberleigh Arn, Shawnda Jacquett, Donald Robinson, Kimberly Scott and Angela Bassett. Plays at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, at 7 p.m. Sundays, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2. Closes March 13. Tickets $17-$24. Balboa Park, San Diego. (619) 235-2255.