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The late playwright August Wilson had a dream -- he wanted to see more plays reflecting the black American experience, in black-run theaters, with black casts, for black audiences. We can assume the dream extended to directors. Now we have a majestic revival of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone", and the main man behind the scenes is white director Bartlett Sher. Would Wilson approve?

We can only hope the answer would be, yes. This moody, moving production features a rock-solid cast of stage veterans and younger performers, and it captures perfectly the natural rhythms and mythic dimensions of Wilson's mid-career play, last seen on Broadway 21 years ago.

The action takes place in 1911 in the Pittsburgh boarding house of one Seth Holley, played by Ernie Hudson, a no-nonsense pragmatist and entrepreneur who keeps his eye fixed on the bottom line. One of Seth's more eccentric boarders is a mystical fellow named Bynum, played by the magnificent Roger Robinson whose goal in life is to bind people to one another, as he puts it, so they can sing their own song.

Seth's newest lodger is the fearsome, haunted Herald Loomis, who has traveled up north from the Jim Crow South with his 11-year-old daughter, having served seven years on a chain gang and is now searching for his wife.

Wilson introduces a handful of other expertly drawn characters such as the free-spirited man-eater Molly, deliciously played by Aunjanue Ellis, and the naïve and lovelorn Mattie, Marsha Stephanie Blake. Andre Holland and Arliss Howard contribute vivid supporting turns as a hotshot young guitar player and a white traveling salesman, respectively. Bartlett Sher's production remains fiercely true to the spirit of Wilson's humane and morally purging vision, in which the everyday shades into the expressionistic, and Loomis realizes that only an act of self-violence will free him from his past.

"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" proves that Wilson's rich, cathartic dramas are with us for a good long time, no matter who's behind the scenes. It's August Wilson's universe. Bartlett Sher and the rest of us are just lucky to visit now and then. David Cote of Time Out New York for NY1.