AMAZING THEATER HERE AND NOW

Kai A. Ealy stands in a doorway wearing a coat that looks like it weighs forty pounds. Maybe it does. His Herald Loomis has just walked off seven years of forced labor on Joe Turner’s chain gang, and the weight is literal: bones, memory, rage, the specific gravity of stolen time. Ealy doesn’t perform arrival. He embodies aftermath. The man vibrates, and Gregg T. Daniel’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone starts from that frequency and doesn’t let up.

August Wilson’s 1911 Pittsburgh boarding house pulses with people who’ve survived things they can’t quite name. At A Noise Within in Pasadena, Tesshi Nakagawa‘s set gets this exactly right. Worn wood, a primitive stove, kitchen table that’s absorbed decades of bad news. You believe people have cried here. Laughed, too, but mostly survived. The space feels inhabited before anyone speaks, which is the hardest trick a designer can pull off.

Alex Morris and Gerald C. Rivers

Gerald C. Rivers plays Bynum, the resident mystic, and watching him is like watching someone read a book only he can see. Wilson gives Bynum the play’s thesis about finding your song, but Rivers delivers it like directions to the hardware store. Practical magic. The role could curdle into stereotype in lesser hands; Rivers makes him the smartest person onstage who happens to speak in metaphors because straight talk doesn’t cut it for what he’s describing.

The juba scene late in Act One is where Mr. Daniel earns his paycheck and then some. Joyce Guy‘s choreography starts as something you might see at a rent party, hands clapping, feet finding the beat, then Loomis crashes through it screaming. Ealy plays the moment as full-body possession, not performance. His cry comes from someplace pre-language, and when he collapses, the silence afterward feels like the room is holding its breath. This is Wilson letting the ancestors into the room, and Daniel stages it with such clarity and power that you forget you’re watching a play. You’re watching a rupture.

Nija Okoro, Brandon Gill, Kai A, Ealy, Gerald C. Rivers,
Veralyn Jones, Alex Morris, Briana James

Veralyn Jones as Bertha Holly anchors the production with warmth that never tips into sentimentality. If Rivers is the play’s spiritual compass, Jones is its beating heart. She moves through that boarding house like someone who’s seen every variety of human disaster and still makes biscuits at dawn. Alex Morris plays her husband Seth with the fussy exactitude of a man who knows if he stops moving, he’ll have to think too hard. Together they create a marriage you believe has survived actual winters. Mr. Daniel gives them room to build a lived-in rhythm, and they reward his trust with scenes that feel caught rather than performed.

Briana James and Veralyn Jones

Brandon Gill’s Jeremy plays the guitar like he means it and brings restless optimism to every scene. His courtship of Mattie, played with raw vulnerability by Briana James, gives the play its emotional texture. Nija Okoro‘s Molly Cunningham smolders through her scenes with an intelligence that makes her drifter’s life feel like a choice, not a circumstance. Mr. Daniel has staged these romantic threads with real care, finding the longing underneath the flirtation.

Jessica Williams, Veralyn Jones, Alex Morris and Gerald C. Rivers

Where the production occasionally fights against itself is in Wilson’s structure, not Daniel’s staging. The playwright was still finding his footing in 1986, and Act Two meanders when the play’s engine is Loomis’s search for his wife Martha. Wilson introduces subplots that feel thematically connected but dramatically inert. Scenes of romantic negotiation dilute the intensity of Loomis’s spiritual crisis. These passages aren’t failures, exactly. They’re Wilson testing how much social portraiture his mythic framework can carry. Mr. Daniel directs them with as much momentum as the text allows, but you feel the play’s center of gravity shifting when it should be tightening.

What keeps everything grounded: the production’s understanding that Wilson’s ancestors aren’t metaphorical. Karyn D. Lawrence‘s lighting and Jeff Gardner‘s sound design guide the audience from kitchen table realism to vision without announcing the transitions. Lawrence bathes key moments in light that feels both natural and numinous. Gardner layers in blues phrases and ambient sound that reminds you what’s underneath the everyday. The technical work serves the play’s strangeness without calling attention to itself.

Jared Bennett and Jessica Williams

Wilson set this play in 1911, five years after Black voter registration in Louisiana dropped from 130,000 to 1,342. His characters are trying to find their names, their songs, their autonomy while the mechanisms of disenfranchisement tighten around them. Watching it now, with the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act already reshaping access to the ballot, that 1911 feels uncomfortably familiar. The play’s people live in a moment when political power is being systematically stripped away. We’re watching a version of that theft unfold again in real time, voter ID laws and gerrymandering doing the work that poll taxes and literacy tests once did.

Tori Danner appears late as Martha, Loomis’s long-lost wife, and in about ten minutes of stage time recontextualizes everything. She’s not waiting to be rescued. She found Jesus, yes, but more importantly, she found a life. Jessica Williams as young Zonia brings unforced naturalism to a role that could easily tip into preciousness. Her scenes with Bertha have a gentle rhythm that provides necessary relief from the play’s building intensity. The entire ensemble operates with the ease of actors who’ve been given a clear vision and the freedom to inhabit it fully.

Bert Emmett, Gerald C, Rivers, Jessica Williams, Veralyn Jones,
Alex Morris, Tori Danner and Kai A. Ealy

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone remains Wilson’s most spiritually ambitious early work, the play where he first lets the metaphysical rupture the surface of domestic realism. A Noise Within’s production honors that ambition with care and emotional clarity. Mr. Daniel understands that the play is strange, and he doesn’t try to domesticate it.

This is Wilson before he perfected his architecture, which means the play sprawls in ways that Fences and The Piano Lesson do not. Yet the sprawl has its own beauty when staged with this much clarity and conviction. It is also a quintessential A Noise Within production, classical form stripped to psychological essence. The company’s aesthetic has always favored emotional transparency over directorial concept, design that breathes rather than dazzles, and an ensemble cohesion that makes even mythic moments feel lived in. Daniel’s staging fits that tradition exactly, spiritual inquiry rendered through clear eyes and grounded craft. You leave thinking about Ealy’s stillness, Rivers’ practical mysticism, and Jones keeping the world spinning through sheer will. You leave thinking about a production that trusts Wilson’s strangeness and the audience’s capacity to meet it.

Kai A. Ealy, Gerald C. Rivers, Bert Emmett

photos by Craig Schwartz

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
A Noise Within
3352 E Foothill Blvd in Pasadena
2 hours, 30 minutes, one intermission
Thurs-Sat at 7:30; Sat & Sun at 2
ends on November 17, 2025
for tickets ($48-$75), call 626.356.3100 visit A Noise Within

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

Brandon Gill and Briana James