Joe Turner's Come and Gone is the second of ten plays that makes up The Pittsburgh Cycle. Penned by playwright August Wilson, it was first staged in 1984 in Waterford, Connecticut, admittedly a very long way off-Broadway, but it made its move to the heart of Theaterland in March 1988, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. The unusual title was not Wilson's original selection, but he finally settled on it after listening to his favorite early blues music one evening, and found that he was unable to get the refrain of the song Joe Turner our of his mind.
The play focuses upon the second of ten decades chronicled in the Cycle and documents the lives of characters who were formerly slaves, but have since been freed. Their experiences in the North and their struggle against racism and assimilation into a free society are the key themes of the play. It is similar to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf not in content or theme, but in the way in which the audience are made to feel as if they are intruders in somebody else's home as they watch the family struggles of each of the characters play out on the stage in front of them.
When the play was revived in 1988, it was an immediate success, receiving the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, and also garnering two additional nominations in the Best Play category from the Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards respectively.
The Pittsburgh Cycle is the best-known of Wilson's work and as a whole earned him two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. As a playwright he was greatly helped by the Black Arts Mission, and inspired by those who had gone before him he founded the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh, his home town. Both the theater and his childhood home were declared historic landmarks by the Pittsburgh City Council in 2007, his house added to the National Register of Historic Places the year after.
Wilson passed away in October 2005; two weeks after his passing the Virginia Theater on Broadway was re-named the August Wilson Theater in his memory.
