Waiting for On-Oui or Godot Ain’t Comin’
To say that man is unaware, in his understanding of the significance of humanity, is at times truth. A man, such as August Wilson, can tell a storyto which the human is chief. Then set forth, without total grasp of his story, to publish the story. It is upon publication the author transforms himself; an author not of words he has written but of the condition he has illustrated. Wilson, unsure the exact nature of his condition, tried to duplicate it. “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is not a condition of humanity (the ailments shared by mankind by means of reactive, and at times volatile, nature of emotions), but a story of characters never alive. The characters are not humans—raw and unabridged in an almost festering form—but as follows: Seth Holly, a man in his early fifties, son of a freedman. Living in Pittsburg with his early fifties wife Bertha; Bynum Walker, rootworker and neighborhood creepy old man; Rutherford Selig, a greasy white man; Jeremy Furlow, a young man with three equally non-functioning brains; Harold Loomis, the anti-climactic, miserable mystery; Zonia Loomis, a daughter; Ruben Scott, the definitive boy (still, perhaps, the most complex and rounded of the characters); Mattie Campbell, defined by her legs; Molly Cunningham, defined by her wallet; and Martha Loomis, who is absent, even in her presence.

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” states that every man must find his song. The character who have not yet found their song are degenerate, disincarnate, and ash: only a memory left of what they once were, or possibly could be; primordial soup, the promise of a human being. The raw creature that is man alive in the first several pages of a play, August Wilson destroyed in eagerness, the feat of a play for every decade. Wilson’s characters are waiting for complexity, the wheels of Wilson’s brain spinning performance for the reader, but the characters: not but dust of potential, ugly while they wait.

The nature of the human condition is on purpose the recollection of that which is us against the monkeys. Maybe the metaphysical angst of the French in combination with the Twainist contemplation of the River Liffey traveled by none other than the entire Oblonsky family? If not, defiantly then, by any means, the conflict of existence parallel to the directness of extinction. The construction of the human drama is character beyond action; for words are without meaning when meaning is restricted to the page. It is the human condition that eliminates the arguments of white v. black, man v. woman, rich v. poor. To allow publication of a work that is clearly limited in its audience and/or stunted in its diversity of emotions, conflict, or even opposing light and dark; it is almost to declare: “I am not of the human race!” Whether by mind such a declaration is that of seniority/inferiority is dependent on the declarer. Still, the refusal of one’s existence is beyond Parisian.