Theater review: Penumbra’s ‘Joe Turner’ treats August Wilson’s words with maximum reverence

If you visited a bar or coffeehouse on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue or in its Cathedral Hill neighborhood between 1978 and 1990 and noticed someone in the corner scribbling on napkins or a legal pad, there’s a good chance that you were witnessing one of the world’s most masterful playwrights at work.

Theater review: Penumbra’s ‘Joe Turner’ treats August Wilson’s words with maximum reverence. If you visited a bar or coffeehouse on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue or in its Cathedral Hill neighborhood between 1978 and 1990 and noticed someone in the corner scribbling on napkins or a legal pad, there’s a good chance that you were witnessing one of the world’s most masterful playwrights at work. Such venues were the office space of August Wilson, who claimed that listening in on conversations helped shape his astounding facility for translating natural human speech to the stage. And, with the encouragement of Minneapolis’ Playwrights Center and St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre, he emerged as theater’s poet laureate of African-American culture, composing a 10-play cycle that set each of its stories in a different decade of the 20th century. Wilson wrote...