Joe Turner's Come and Gone at the Alley Theatre: you may come or go, depending on your dramatic taste. This drama by August Wilson (author of last year's acclaimed play Fences) confused or put to sleep some patrons dur ing the first act, but received a standing ovation from the full house at the end of the evening. If you go to the theater only for physical action and taut conflict, this is not your play. But if you enjoy unraveling character puzzles, watching internal struggles for identity, and examining the symbology and themes of a long work slowly unfolding on stage, Joe Turner will make for a fine literary evening.

August Wilson plans eventually to complete ten plays about black Americans, set in each decade of this century. The 1911 Pittsburgh boardinghouse of Joe Turner's Come and Gone shows us the tumultuous "Teens," when the flush of freedom following the Emancipation gave way in the South to the new bondage of Jim Crow laws, discrimination, and Joe Turner's indentures. Wilson explains "Joe Turner was a real person. He was the brother of Pete Turner, who was the governor of Tennessee.... He would send out decoys who would lure Blacks into [illegal] crap games and then he would swoop down and... take [them] off to his plantation and work them" for a seven-year term of effective, albeit legal, slavery.

Seth and Bertha Holly, the black owners of the boardinghouse in which the play takes place, see a variety of visitors, mostly other blacks coming North in search of jobs and prosperity. Bynum Walker, a houngan, or voodoo priest, performs odd rituals with pigeons and serves as faith healer, fortune-teller, and psychologist for the other displaced inhabitants of the house. Jeremy Furlow, an eager young man who gains a profitable job building roads but loses it when he refuses to kick back wages, wavers in his affections between the hard-working Mattie Campbell and the indolent, seductive Molly Cunningham. But all their lives are disrupted by the arrival of the sinister Herald Loomis and his daughter Zonia, in search of Herald's missing wife.

But a plot synopsis cannot adequately describe Joe Turner's Come and Gone: its charm lies not so much in what the characters do as how they do it and what they talk about. This is a very naturalistic play: people go about their day-to-day business and pleasure in a very ordinary, functional set with a sitting-room, dining-room, and kitchen. It's easy to become bored with the almost humdrum existence of these characters until you begin to detect the underlying struggles for identity and community, the fears and desires, that propel each one of them through the plot.

For me, the first act was tedious, over-long in exposition, but within minutes of the start of the second act I began to see deeper into the on-stage psyches, and to enjoy the play more. The second act moves faster and faster, showing more and more clearly Wilson's underlying themes of estrangement and connection, separation and community, until the thrilling finale ties off all the plot strands, if not happily, at least philosophically.

Alex Allen Morris (Seth Holly)

Joe Turner's Come and Gone, by August Wilson, plays Tuesday through Friday at 8 PM, Saturday at 4 PM and 9 PM, and Sunday at 2:30 PM and 7:30 PM, through Sunday, Feb. 3, 1991, on the Large Stage at the Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue downtown. Normal ticket prices range from $10 - $31. Students with valid ID cards may purchase student rush tickets for $10. "Informances" -- free hour-long pre-show discussions with the director and cast members -- will be held on January 17, 20, and 30. For reservations or further information, call the Alley Theatre box office, 228-8421.