In "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," one of the greatest plays from August Wilson's majestic cycle exploring the African-American experience in the 20th century, virtually all the characters are in an anguished search for something. A lost wife, a straying man, a better life, a place to come to rest, a purpose. In one of the most beautiful monologues, the mystic Bynum, here played by the estimable Ruben Santiago-Hudson, speaks of the need for all people to find their own "song" -- their way to make their "mark on life."
He speaks of this spiritual search as a long and arduous process. So perhaps it's somewhat fitting, if hardly ideal, that the uneven new Broadway revival of this masterwork, directed by Debbie Allen, takes its time to find its own sure footing. But find it it eventually does, culminating in a transporting climactic scene that reaches rare heights of dramatic intensity and emotional force.
A minor infelicity is the distractingly busy set by David Gallo. The play takes place almost entirely within a boarding house in Pittsburgh in 1911. Mr. Gallo's design for this is evocative, but a backdrop depicting a cityscape looms behind it, detracting from the play's intimacy. Three windows hang high at the front of the stage; easy to ignore if you sit in the orchestra, but perhaps less so if you're in the balcony.
Another distraction: During that first long, lyrical monologue from Bynum, a blues guitar solo is heard. Wilson's language itself has an assured and muscular musicality. Piling actual music on top of it is redundant, if not a desecration. (Fortunately this does not recur.)
Ultimately any staging of a Wilson play rises or falls on the quality of the ensemble, the ability of the performers to unearth all the immense riches in the dialogue and the characters. Some of the cast assembled here take a little too long to find the essence of the men and women they portray, but on the whole they do distinguished and affecting work.
An exception, unhappily, is Taraji P. Henson, along with Cedric the Entertainer one of the marquee names. They play Bertha and Seth Holley, the married proprietors of the boarding house. Ms. Henson, known for her acclaimed film and television work, is making her Broadway debut. She has no trouble commanding the stage, and brings a bustling maternal warmth to the role, but she renders the character in broad and overly brassy strokes, hands forever on her hips as Bertha dispenses advice and nuggets of wisdom, or tries to restrain her husband's meddling tendencies. Cedric fares much better, giving a vibrant, darkly funny performance as Seth, who considers himself a stern watcher over the manners and mores of his tenants.
The resident who has lived at the boarding house the longest is Bynum, and Mr. Santiago-Hudson, who has both appeared in and directed Wilson's plays, gives the most rounded and captivating performance. To Bynum belong the play's moving and intricate monologues -- including a spellbinder about the beauty and necessity of men and women finding a source of strength and comfort in their love -- and Mr. Santiago-Hudson delivers each with an easy grace and eloquence. To borrow a word Bynum uses repeatedly, his performance has a "shining" authenticity.
As Mattie Campbell, who seeks out Bynum because she's been told he has the gift of bringing people together (his name comes from this ability to "bind" two souls), Nimene Sierra Wureh starts off a bit stridently as she implores Bynum to bring back the man she loves, but her performance softens and blooms as Mattie warms to the young Jeremy Furlow, a boarding-house tenant played with funny, cocky confidence by Tripp Taylor.
Aside from Bynum, the play's most significant figure is Herald Loomis (Joshua Boone), a deacon who has come to the boarding house to continue his years-long search for his wife, bringing along their 11-year-old daughter, Zonia (Savannah Commodore). Wilson describes Herald in detail in the script: "A man driven not by the hellhounds that seemingly bay at his heels, but by his search for a world that speaks to something about himself."
Mr. Boone initially creates only a mild impression, making Seth's suspicion of him and discomfort in his presence hard to fathom. We get no sense of the man's haunted determination -- no hints of those hellhounds. This makes Herald's explosive and terrifying fit, in which he falls to the ground as if thrown by force, and relates a dark vision of bones walking on water, seem to come from nowhere. (It doesn't help that, in an ill-conceived choice, Ms. Allen has the other characters perform a kind of slow-motion dance during this crucial passage.)
But in the final scene, when Herald and his wife, Martha, played with extraordinary power and dignity by Abigail Onwunali, confront each other and engage in a heart-scorching reckoning over the tragic events that separated them, Mr. Boone becomes suffused with the pain, anger and despair -- but also the righteousness -- that make us see with startling clarity the suffering that has blighted this man but also the fortitude that ennobles him. And so the evening concludes with an explosion of emotion that redeems its flaws, and sends us reeling, shaken, into the night.