Entertainment
Review: The power of August Wilson’s best play, ‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,’ lives on at A Noise Within
“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” arguably the finest work in August Wilson’s 10-play series chronicling the African American experience in the 20th century, is set in a boarding house in Pittsburgh in 1911. The Great Migration is underway, with millions of Black Americans moving from the rural South to the industrial North and Midwest in search of opportunity and freedom.
Gregg T. Daniel, who has been making his way through Wilson’s decade-by-decade cycle at A Noise Within, has infused his revival of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” with a sense of momentous transit. The characters who stop for a time at the boarding house owned and operated by Seth (Alex Morris) and his wife, Bertha (Veralyn Jones), understand that this is a way station, a place to collect oneself before continuing on the fraught journey to an unknown future.
Slavery didn’t end with the Civil War, as Herald Loomis (Kai A. Ealy) knows only too well. He has arrived at the boarding house with his young daughter, Zonia (Jessica Williams), in tow. For seven years, Loomis was held captive in Joe Turner’s chain gang, abducted for being Black, forced into hard labor and separated from his wife, whom he has been searching for since his release.
Loomis has a turbulent presence that casts an anxious pall over the boarding house, re-created with a background view of Pittsburgh’s bridges by scenic designer Tesshi Nakagawa. Bynum (Gerald C. Rivers), a conjure man who serves as a spiritual guide for the other residents, understands right away that Loomis is a man who has lost his song, the imprint of his soul. But Seth sees nothing but trouble from his new guest and tells Loomis he must leave by Saturday.
Kai A. Ealy and Jessica Williams in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at A Noise Within.
(Craig Schwartz)
The timing works out because Saturday is when Rutherford Selig (Bert Emmett), a peddler and touted people finder, is expected to return with news of the whereabouts of Loomis’ missing wife, Martha (Tori Danner). Before he can press on as a free man, Loomis needs to know what happened to his wife.
Life keeps racing ahead whether the characters are ready or not. Jeremy (Brandon Gill), a new resident who’s part of the construction team of a new bridge but would rather be exercising his considerable skill on the guitar, is being harassed by the police when off duty and exploited by a white man when on the job. He romantically takes up first with Mattie Campbell (Briana James), who comes to Bynum to see if he can mystically bring back the man that left her. But after Molly Cunningham (Nija Okoro) flirtatiously moves in and Jeremy loses his job, his amorous attention turns to her, leaving Mattie once again in the lurch, though Loomis has already noticed what a fine “full” woman she is.
Gerald C. Rivers and Brandon Gill in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at A Noise Within.
(Craig Schwartz)
Daniel’s production, put into sharper focus by Kate Bergh’s costumes and Karyn Lawrence’s lighting, is at its best in capturing the rhythms and rituals of daily life. The ensemble (full of A Noise Within Wilson alums) melds miraculously as the characters share meals, stories, musical ecstasy and fits of laughter. Wilson had a genius for depicting how people do and don’t get along when they haven’t much choice about the company they keep. Jones, who was so brilliant in Daniel’s production of “King Hedley II” at A Noise Within is just as luminous here as the calming force at the boardinghouse. Her Bertha is the kindly, nurturing counterweight to Seth’s badgering boisterousness, a quality Morris infuses with just enough avuncular affection.
The more time we spend with Gill’s Jeremy, Okoro’s Molly and James’ Mattie, the more we can appreciate the fine-drawn nature of their portraits. The revival has some acoustical static and moments of mumbling, but “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” grows more lifelike and absorbing with each scene.
The spiritual standoff in the play is between Ealy’s Loomis and Rivers’ Bynum, and both actors bring a muscular reality to a reckoning that can no longer be postponed. Daniel’s staging loses its grip during the more hallucinatory scenes between the characters. The natural is a good deal more theatrically convincing than the supernatural in this production. But Ealy intensely conveys the threat of Loomis’ angry-somber brooding and Rivers lets us see that the source of Bynum’s otherworldly power is his humane vision.
Bynum is a seeker as well as a seer, inseparable from the struggles of his people. He shares that living sense of heritage that Wilson, who died in 2005, made the principal subject of his art. This production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” seems like a gift from the other side, that mysterious, creative realm where history is spiritualized.
‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone’
Where: A Noise Within, 3352 E Foothill Blvd., Pasadena
When: 7:30 Thursdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Nov. 9
Tickets: Start at $51.50
Contact: www.anoisewithin.org or (626) 356-3100
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes, including one intermission
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: An electric Timothée Chalamet is the consummate striver in propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’
“Everybody wants to rule the world,” goes the Tears for Fears song we hear at a key point in “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s nerve-busting adrenaline jolt of a movie starring a never-better Timothée Chalamet.
But here’s the thing: everybody may want to rule the world, but not everybody truly believes they CAN. This, one could argue, is what separates the true strivers from the rest of us.
And Marty — played by Chalamet in a delicious synergy of actor, role and whatever fairy dust makes a performance feel both preordained and magically fresh — is a striver. With every fiber of his restless, wiry body. They should add him to the dictionary definition.
Needless to say, Marty is a New Yorker.
Also needless to say, Chalamet is a New Yorker.
And so is Safdie, a writer-director Chalamet has called “the street poet of New York.” So, where else could this story be set?
It’s 1952, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Marty Mauser is a salesman in his uncle’s shoe store, escaping to the storeroom for a hot tryst with his (married) girlfriend. Suddenly we’re seeing footage of sperm traveling — talk about strivers! — up to an egg. Which morphs, of course, into a pingpong ball.
This witty opening sequence won’t be the only thing recalling “Uncut Gems,” co-directed by Safdie with his brother Benny before the two split for solo projects. That film, which feels much like the precursor to “Marty Supreme,” began as a trip through the shiny innards of a rare opal, only to wind up inside Adam Sandler’s colon, mid-colonoscopy.
Sandler’s Howard Ratner was a New York striver, too, but sadder, and more troubled. Marty is young, determined, brash — with an eye always to the future. He’s a great salesman: “I could sell shoes to an amputee,” he boasts, crassly. But what he’s plotting to unveil to the world has nothing to do with shoes. It’s about table tennis.
This image released by A24 shows Timothée Chalamet in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)
How likely is it that this Jewish kid from the Lower East Side can become the very face of a sport in America, soon to be “staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box?”
To Marty, perfectly likely. Still, he knows nobody in the U.S. cares about table tennis. He’s so determined to prove everyone wrong, starting at the British Open in London, that when there’s a snag obtaining cash for his trip, he brandishes a gun at a colleague to get it.
Shaking off that sorta-armed robbery thing, Marty arrives in London, where he fast-talks his way into a suite at the Ritz. Here, he spies fellow guest Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a wise, stylish return to the screen), a former movie star married to an insufferable tycoon (“Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary, one of many nonactors here.)
Kay’s skeptical, but Marty finds a way to woo her. Really, all he has to say is: “Come watch me.” Once she sees him play, she’s sneaking into his room in a lace corselet.
This image released by A24 shows Gwyneth Paltrow in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)
This would be a good time to stop and consider Chalamet’s subtly transformed appearance. He is stick-thin — duh, he never stops moving. His mustache is skimpy. His skin is acne-scarred — just enough to erase any movie-star sheen. Most strikingly, his eyes, behind the round spectacles, are beady — and smaller. Definitely not those movie-star eyes.
But then, nearly all the faces in “Marty Supreme” are extraordinary. In a movie with more than 100 characters, we have known actors (Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara); nonacting personalities (O’Leary, and an excellent Tyler Okonma (Tyler, The Creator) as Marty’s friend Wally); and exciting newcomers like Odessa A’Zion as Marty’s feisty girlfriend Rachel.
There are also a slew of nonactors in small parts, plus cameos from the likes of David Mamet and even high wire artist Philippe Petit. The dizzying array makes one curious how it all came together — is casting director Jennifer Venditti taking interns? Production notes tell us that for one hustling scene at a bowling alley, young men were recruited from a sports trading-card convention.
Elsewhere on the creative team, composer Daniel Lopatin succeeds in channelling both Marty’s beating heart and the ricochet of pingpong balls in his propulsive score. The script by Safdie and cowriter Ronald Bronstein, loosely based on real-life table tennis hustler Marty Reisman, beats with its own, never-stopping pulse. The same breakneck aesthetic applies to camera work by Darius Khondji.
Back now to London, where Marty makes the finals against Japanese player Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, like his character a deaf table tennis champion). “I’ll be dropping a third atom bomb on them,” he brags — not his only questionable World War II quip. But Endo, with his unorthodox paddle and grip, prevails.
After a stint as a side act with the Harlem Globetrotters, including pingpong games with a seal — you’ll have to take our word for this, folks, we’re running low on space — Marty returns home, determined to make the imminent world championships in Tokyo.
But he’s in trouble — remember he took cash at gunpoint? Worse, he has no money.
So Marty’s on the run. And he’ll do anything, however messy or dangerous, to get to Japan. Even if he has to totally debase himself (mark our words), or endanger friends — or abandon loyal and brave Rachel.
This image released by A24 shows Odessa A’zion in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)
Is there something else for Marty, besides his obsessive goal? If so, he doesn’t know it yet. But the lyrics of another song used in the film are instructive here: “Everybody’s got to learn sometime.”
So can a single-minded striver ultimately learn something new about his own life?
We’ll have to see. As Marty might say: “Come watch me.”
“Marty Supreme,” an A24 release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for language throughout, sexual content, some violent content/bloody images and nudity.” Running time: 149 minutes. Four stars out of four.
Despite its ubiquity in our machines and in the news, artificial intelligence remains both a mystery and a source of deep anxiety across occupations and generations. My students, my readers, my colleagues and kids: We are all bewildered by the mix of hype and hope, optimism and doomerism making up the discourse around AI. On the one hand, the quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI) and a utopian belief in the life-improving promise of these emergent technologies; on the other, new algorithmic forms of injustice, the displacement of whole work forces and the limitless sloppification of language, music, video and other aesthetic forms — to say nothing of the threat of human extinction.
The 11 books described below, all published recently, give us helpful sight lines into our turbulent AI age. Some titles are hard-hitting trade nonfiction. One is an academic critique. Others are novels, fictional accounts that imagine how our world is being reshaped (and will be further transformed) by the many technologies grouped under the term artificial intelligence: deepfakes and autonomous drones, AI-enhanced medical scans and self-driving cars.
What all these books have in common is their awareness that AI is transforming our world in ways all too easy to imagine yet nearly impossible to predict.
“Vantage Point: A Novel” by Sara Sligar
(MCD)
“Vantage Point”
By Sara Sligar
MCD: 400 pages, $29
This twisty and brilliantly written thriller about a Maine family spins a tale of ambition, trauma and privilege around the proliferation of so-called deepfakes. Those AI-generated videos play an increasing role in the spread of slanderous accusations and political disinformation in today’s public sphere. Whether the footage at the center of the plot is real or computer-generated is one of the burning questions at the heart of the novel, which plumbs the nature of reality in our age of digital disinformation and virtual selves.
“The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI” by Dr. Fei-Fei Li
(Flatiron Books: A Moment of Lift)
“The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI”
By Fei-Fei Li
Flatiron: 336 pages, $20
Though it’s been out for two years already, Li’s account of the early years of computer vision and deep learning is a refreshing break from the LLM-centric discourse dominating many discussions of AI. Li shows us the broader computational context of AI’s emergence, explaining key concepts and breakthroughs in vivid, comprehensible detail. “The Worlds I See” is also a scientific autobiography, a compelling account of Li’s personal and intellectual journey from the impoverished circumstances of a Chinese immigrant family life to a wealthy and world-leading university lab.
“Death of the Author: A Novel” by Nnedi Okorafor
(William Morrow)
“Death of the Author”
By Nnedi Okorafor
William Morrow: 448 pages, $30
“Rusted Robots” is the title of the AI-themed novel-within-a-novel that Zelu, Okorafor’s MFA-wielding protagonist, writes in the wake of a creative and professional calamity. As we encounter excerpts from the book — an Africanfuturist (Okorafor’s preferred term) narrative set in a postapocalyptic West Africa — we learn how the novel achieves phenomenal sales and success that eluded Zelu when she was writing literary fiction, even as Okorafor explores the perils of fame and new fortune. The result is a powerful meditation on the roles of disability, autonomy and privilege in the shaping of literary making in an age when art itself is increasingly threatened by machines.
“Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age” by Vauhini Vara
(Pantheon)
“Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age”
By Vauhini Vara
Pantheon: 352 pages, $30
Vara’s moving account of her uncanny exchanges with a chatbot about her sister’s death became a viral sensation after it appeared in the Believer in 2021, at the dawn of our LLM-obsessed age. In a series of further essays, reflections and fragments, Vara — a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel “The Immortal King Rao” as well as a former technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal — investigates the role of digital technologies in making us who we are, and may want to become. The book bristles with insight and originality, interspersing Vara’s more journalistic expositions with excurses and fragments curated from the author’s expansive digital life.
“Notes on Infinity: A Novel” by Austin Taylor
(Celadon)
“Notes on Infinity: A Novel”
By Austin E. Taylor
Celadon: 400 pages, $30
Though Taylor’s absorbing debut swings more biotech than AI, the novel beautifully captures the extreme techno-optimism of the multibillionaire set — in this case around the possibility of eternal human life. As Zoe, one of the protagonists, notes early on, her interest in a particular professor’s work stems from his success in “using AI neural networks to understand biological neural networks and the processes of thinking.” “Notes on Infinity” combines the traditional campus novel with the zeitgeisty tech novel, featuring Harvard students with “edge” placing “bets on the next Zuck in the dining halls.”
“Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI” by Olga Goriunova
(Minnesota)
“Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI”
By Olga Goriunova
Minnesota: 232 pages, $32
This deeply researched study examines how AI systems create “abstract people”: statistical confections, subject profiles and anthropomorphic personages that increasingly substitute for humans in digital environments. Goriunova, a cultural theorist and digital curator based in London, examines how these constructed figures and abstractions shape surveillance, governance and everyday life. What is a “digital person,” and why should we care? Goriunova’s answers prove as complex as they are fascinating.
“Annie Bot” by Sierra Greer
(Mariner)
“Annie Bot”
By Sierra Greer
Mariner: 240 pages, $19
The success of the two “M3gan” films suggests a never-ending fascination with human-like cyborgs — though in the case of “Annie Bot,” this fascination is laced with a prurient eroticism that Greer both exploits and cleverly frustrates in her insightful debut. Annie is a sexbot companion operating in autodidactic mode, learning her owner’s sexual proclivities in much the same way AlphaGo perfected the ancient game of Go. At the heart of novel, though, is a thoughtful and darkly humorous meditation on the politics of AI personhood and subjection comparable to Kazuo Ishiguro’s project in “Klara and the Sun,” and with equally harrowing implications.
“Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI” by Karen Hao
(Penguin Press)
“Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI”
By Karen Hao
Penguin Press: 496 pages, $32
Hao’s bestselling account of OpenAI and its neoimperial ambitions has received lots of coverage, though it deserves an even wider readership. Formerly an application engineer at a Google spinoff, Hao writes with an insider’s knowledge about the relationship between technological innovation and socioeconomic inequality around the world, from resource-guzzling data centers in Chile to ego-filled executive suites in San Francisco. Full of industry anecdotes and sobering analyses, the book is a riveting introduction to the corporate culture of artificial intelligence and its designs on all of us.
“Who Knows You by Heart: A Novel” by C.J. Farley
(William Morrow)
“Who Knows You by Heart”
By C. J. Farley
William Morrow: 288 pages, $30
Algorithmic bias and injustice are at the heart of this ingenious novel of technological innovation and corporate malfeasance. Farley’s protagonist is Octavia Crenshaw, a down-on-her-luck coder recently hired by Eustachian, an audio entertainment company exploiting new ways to bring stories to the world. After a series of mishaps and disturbing incidents at the company, Octavia teams up with another coder named Walcott to develop a bias-free AI storytelling model — only to discover the limits of her computational and political ideals. The novel is a riveting critique of Big Tech and its faux-liberal aspirations to correct the world’s wrongs.
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
(Little, Brown and Company)
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All”
By Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
Little, Brown: 272 pages, $30
Earning its apocalyptic title, this doomerist manifesto by two of the leading figures in the tech world appears in an era saturated with reckless optimism and hype. The book provides a sobering look at issues such as potential misalignments between human designers and the AI systems they release into the world, systems with goals of their own that we may not understand in time to thwart their most catastrophic outcomes. The main message: Be afraid. Be very afraid. The book offers a glimmer of hope as well, albeit a faint one, and concludes with some plainspoken recommendations about proceeding with extreme caution and slowing down.
“UnWorld: A Novel” by Jason Greene
(Knopf)
“UnWorld”
By Jayson Greene
Knopf: 224 pages, $28
This deeply moving novel explores the aftermath of loss and the shape of grief in an age of avatars and algorithmically mediated emotion. When a teenager named Alex dies of mysterious causes, part of the burden of mourning falls on Aviva, an upload virtually confected out of pain. By imagining technologies that can shoulder our memories, our labor and our most shattering emotions, Greene questions whether AI risks nurturing a fantasy that code can heal what hurts in our inner lives. A timely meditation on AI’s allure as an escape hatch from the strain of modern consciousness, the novel quietly insists that any lasting tranquility must still be cultivated from within and shared between humans, with all our flaws.
Holsinger’s most recent novel is “Culpability,” an Oprah’s Book Club pick for summer 2025.
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