Trapped.('Joe Turner's Come and Gone', 'Mary Stuart')(Theater review)

The late August Wilson thought of himself as a bluesman. His plays are chronicles of catastrophe, told lyrically; his theatrical mission was "to articulate the cultural response of black Americans to the world in which they found themselves," a world, he said, "that did not recognize their gods, their manners, their mores." 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 premiere, in 1988, at the Belasco, under the deft direction of Bartlett Sher) was his favorite and his masterpiece, the one in which the ...