June 12 - Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Tonight after the workshop I ran uptown and had dinner with one of my former students, Laura Miller, who is just beginning her career as an actress here in NYC. Laura is quite a talent and has the right attitude to succeed here. She has just finished her first year in the city: she has steady work, is auditioning well and being called back, and is making the right contacts. I know I'll soon be coming back to the city to see her on Broadway, as I have with other students of mine.



After dinner with Laura, I walked over to the Belasco Theater to see one of the final performances of Joe Turner's Come and Gone. A tremendous show. One of the best works of August Wilson. As he writes in the introduction to the work:

"It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911.... From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory.... They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow, crooked cobbles and the fiery blasts of the coke furnace a way of bludgeoning and shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth."

I had a bad seat for this performance, all the way over House Left, which cut off a significant portion of the stage, but it was still a wonderful show. A strong and powerful cast, extremely well staged by Bartlett Sher, the show was a truly moving experience and a fitting tribute to one of America's greatest playwrights.