August Wilson’s *Joe Turner’s Come and Gone* is part of his decade-by-decade dramatic record of Black life in the United States, set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse as migrants from the South search for work, family, and a sense of self in the early 20th century. First staged in 1984, it reached Broadway in 1989 and returned in a 2009 revival, placing it firmly in New York theater history. Now at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, it’s presented as a live stage work in the city’s repertory ecosystem. Wilson’s plainspoken structure lets history surface through everyday talk and ritual.