Joe Turner’s Come and Gone often feels like a fever dream. The August Wilson play, whose Debbie Allen–directed revival is playing now on Broadway, follows a handful of Black folks at a boardinghouse in Pittsburgh in 1911 who are each trying to restore or keep a sense of selfhood and some peace to varying extremes. For some, that pursuit carries them — and the play itself — past the bounds of reality. But there is a strong force keeping it all grounded: the home’s matriarch, Bertha Holly, played with aplomb by Taraji P. Henson in her Broadway debut. Bertha is sensible and caring without sugarcoating, and the play can feel lost without her presence when she’s offstage. Henson shares these qualities with Bertha and many of her other roles over the past 25 years, from Baby Boy’s Yvette to Hidden Figures’s real-life NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson. The women she plays are often the glue of their stories. Behind the scenes, throughout her career, Henson has been candid about what it takes to make it as a Black actress in Hollywood and what she will and won’t put up with. “I’ve always been told I’m the truth,” she says in this wide-ranging and deeply personal conversation with features writer Zak Cheney-Rice from our upcoming theater issue. “And I think that’s because of how I live my life.”
—Dee Lockett, senior editor, culture
