Peter Turney was a Tennessee Supreme Court justice who governed that state from 1893 to 1897. His brother, Joe, made a living by transporting Negro prisoners from Memphis to the state pen in Nashville. Along the way, he picked up extra men by enticing them into craps games, arresting and trying them for gambling, then selling them into forced labor literally "down the river." According to playwright August Wilson, when black men turned up missing, friends and relatives would explain their disappearance by saying, "Joe Turner's (sic) come and gone." Turney helped impose a de facto second slavery that lasted for decades. It haunts a Pittsburgh boarding house in Wilson's 1984 play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

Seth and Bertha Holly run the house, where tenants include a young guitar player, Jeremy, and a rootworker (African-style healer) named Bynum. The spiritual practices of the latter, a blend of traditional hoodoo and Southern Christianity, add magical elements to what's essentially a domestic drama set in 1911. A highlight of Act I, for example, is a freeform call-and-response called a juba. That dance doesn't sit well with guest Herald Loomis (note the spelling of the first name), who's returned to Pittsburgh in search of the wife he lost when he was captured by Turner.

>>> Hardscrabble strangers: Joshua Dansby and  Hollis Belt in Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Photo credit: Kali Raisl

Director C. Rosalind Bell's staging completes the Broadway Center's production of all 10 plays in Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle," one for each decade of the 20th century. (Famous installments include Fences and The Piano Lesson, each of which won a Pulitzer Prize.) Joe Turner's Come and Gone demands nuanced work from actors from recognized veterans to Seahawks green. Mark Peterson does glowering, memorable work here as Loomis, though he still has a tendency to amble listlessly below the waist. Hollis Belt is terrific as Bynum, Joshua Dansby charismatic as Jeremy. G. To'mas Jones builds his Seth out of externals, a method reminiscent of sketch characters on SNL or Chappelle's Show. That's fine; it does the job needed, especially as Seth gets the funniest lines. For a show about poverty, depression, and the search for identity in a disenfranchised culture, this production offers a surprising bounty of laughs.

>>> Mixing superstitions and spiritual mysteries: Carrie Ivory in Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Photo credit: Kali Raisl

If Act I is a bit slow to develop, it takes off around the time of the juba. That scene has real power, the kind only live entertainment can evoke. Bynum heals the downtrodden by finding and uniting the songs in their spirits. His charges are, as stage directions dictate, "cleansed and given breath, free from any encumbrance other than the workings of (their) own heart(s) and the bonds of the flesh." I won't go so far as to claim Wilson does the same for his audience, but he does offer multilayered poetic solace.

JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, 7:30 p.m. Saturday (and Friday, Feb. 21), 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 23, Theatre on the Square, 915 Broadway, Tacoma, $19-$32, 253.573.2507