Joe Wilson

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If you visited a bar or coffeehouse on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue or in its Cathedral Hill neighborhood between 1978 and 1990 and noticed someone in the corner scribbling on napkins or a legal pad, there’s a good chance that you were witnessing one of the world’s most masterful playwrights at work.

Such venues were the office space of August Wilson, who claimed that listening in on conversations helped shape his astounding facility for translating natural human speech to the stage. And, with the encouragement of Minneapolis’ Playwrights Center and St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre, he emerged as theater’s poet laureate of African-American culture, composing a 10-play cycle that set each of its stories in a different decade of the 20th century.

Wilson wrote “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” in 1984 as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was headed to Broadway and after he’d completed “Fences,” but before it was produced. “Ma Rainey” would earn him the first of nine nominations for the “Best Play” Tony (second most in history), while “Fences” would win that honor, as well as the Pulitzer Prize.

Yet the production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” that closes Penumbra’s season seems to treat Wilson’s words with too much reverence, for longtime artistic director Lou Bellamy has directed a version that takes the text at an unnaturally slow pace, a staging full of ponderous pauses and storytelling that too often fails to engage due to unvarying dynamics.

And storytelling is central to Wilson’s style, for he was a master of the monologue in which a character relays a past experience and transforms it into a kind of exorcism of personal demons, the disarming vulnerability demanding your rapt attention. But, despite some excellent performances, these characters don’t draw the audience in as capably as they could, leaving one to wonder if this three-hour production could have been shorter and more exhilarating.

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is an ensemble piece in which we’re introduced to eight residents of a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911 amidst the “Great Migration” of African-Americans from south to north. Each is seeking something or someone they’ve lost, and Wilson’s gift for putting poetry into the mouths of laborers and landlords comes to the fore in a series of fascinating character sketches.

Yet, despite the presence of a voodoo practitioner known for “binding” people, the connections between these characters never really come through with any kind of palpable bond. That character is Bynum, and Lester Purry makes him the most magnetic presence onstage in a bravura performance that brings the mystical into an atmosphere of hardscrabble reality.

Also outstanding are James Craven as the proprietor of the boarding house, Seth, whose world-weary blend of firmness and acquiescence is eminently believable, and Darrick Mosley as a young guitar-picking construction worker with raging hormones who brings welcome bursts of energy to every scene he enters.

The technical aspects of the show are also invariably excellent, particularly Mathew J. Lefebvre’s costumes, Don Darnutzer’s lighting and Sean Healey’s soundscape of bluesy banjo and sizzling steel guitar. But they can only do so much to bind together what seems like a collection of relatively disconnected short stories that never coalesce into a satisfying whole.

Rob Hubbard can be reached at [email protected].

‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone’

When: Through June 21

Where: Penumbra Theatre, 270 N. Kent St., St. Paul

Tickets: $45-$20, available at 651-224-3180 or penumbratheatre.org

Capsule: Fine acting, but missing the energy that propels August Wilson’s best work.