SOURCE: "'Tomorrow Never Comes': Songs of Cultural Identity in August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone," in Theatre Journal, Vol. 46, No. 4, December, 1994, pp. 463-76.

In the following essay, Bogumil explores Wilson's handling of his characters experiences with identity, culture, ethnicity, and displacement in Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

The subject of displacement in all its psychological vicissitudes is dramatized in August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, a play in which the African American residents of a boarding house in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1911 attempt to rediscover, repossess, and redefine themselves historically and socially as free citizens. These children of newly freed slaves, like others who came before them, attempt to make a place for themselves in this polyethnic, and certainly hostile, environment.

In order to contrast and magnify the sense of displacement each of these characters of Southern origin experiences in the North, Wilson in his preface personifies...