The Top Ten Moments in Theatre of 2009

John Lahr in The New Yorker:

8. August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” We still don’t have the measure of August Wilson, whose theatrical accomplishment in the twentieth century is surpassed only, in my view, by Tennessee Williams. Of the ten plays in Wilson’s Century Cycle—which bear witness to the African-American experience in each decade of the twentieth century—“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (revived, for the first time since its Broadway premiÿre, in 1988, under the deft direction of Bartlett Sher) was his favorite and his masterpiece, the one in which the historical, the mythical, and the autobiographical reach their most ravishing equipoise. Wilson wanted his plays “fat with substance,” and “Joe Turner” makes astonishing connections both to African-Americans’ adaptation to their new freedom and to the white world. A beautiful, poetic play given an appropriately impressive production.