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The Family Bond in Two Plays

In the plays Joe Turner's Come and Gone by August Wilson and And The Soul Shall Dance by Wakako Yamauchi, the playwright in each case develops a strong sense of the importance of the family bond as each explores the way people cope with their roles in a subculture within a larger, dominant culture that generally does not value them or their cultural background. In each case, the characters aspire to something better than they have already achieved, defined usually as economic success in the American society of which they are a part. In Wilson's play, these aspirations are found in the black community among people whose ancestors were slaves and who themselves do not feel fully part of American society. In Yamauchi's play, the characters are Japanese immigrants cut off from their homeland and from much of their own culture by great distance as well as by the power of American culture as it reshapes the daughter in the family. In both plays, a sense of alienation is a divisive force in family life.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a play about the search for identity among a black population cut off from its roots by the salve era. In Herald Loomis's story, the story of the black experience in America is played out on a smaller stage. Loomis was kidnapped by a man named Joe Turner who forced him and others to work as a slave and pick Turner's cotton. This lasted for seven years, after which Loomis set out to find his wife. He and his wife and infant daughter had a farm before he was taken, and when he returns there, he finds that his wife is gone and has left their daughter with her mother. Loomis now has his daughter with him and wants to turn her over to his wife before he leaves for good.

Loomis comes to Seth Holly's Pittsburgh boardinghouse, along with a number of other characters, all of whom are seeking something without necessarily knowing what it is. Loomis himself is not sure what it is he is seeking--he may be...

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The Family Bond in Two Plays. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:35, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701732.html