Joe Turner's Come and Gone

August Wilson’s *Joe Turner’s Come and Gone* arrives in New York as part of his Century Cycle, a decade-by-decade record of Black life in the 20th century. Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, it follows migrants carrying the aftershocks of enslavement and the more recent violence of forced labor, searching for missing family and a workable sense of self. First seen on Broadway in 1989 and revived in 2009, the work now plays at the Vivian Beaumont Theater as a live musical performance. Its clearest argument is historical: freedom is not the same as belonging.