Watching wilson play like listening to the blues

by Linda Sullivan Baity

Troy Maxson has spent his entire life trapped behind fences he cannot scale. He is a man at once proud and humiliated, hopeful and disillusioned, passionate and yet powerless to surmount the obstacles of racial prejudice, prison bars, family obligations and self-imposed emotional walls that block his way at every turn.

This middle-aged African-American garbage collector and legendary ex-player in the Negro baseball league is the beating heart of August Wilson’s masterwork, Fences. As the drama’s compelling central character, Troy Maxson (a character loosely based on the playwright’s own stepfather) also embodies the inequalities and injustices confronting black Americans throughout the painful course of modern history.

Fences is set in 1957, in the small dirt front yard of the Maxson household, “an ancient two-story brick house set back off a small alley” in Pittsburgh’s impoverished inner-city Hill District. The play opens with Troy and his friend Bono rehashing a recent incident at work when Troy made trouble by complaining that only whites were allowed to drive the garbage trucks. As the stories begin to unfold and family members are added to the mix, including Troy’s wife, Rose, sons Cory and Lyons, and  brother Gabriel, Maxson emerges as a seriously flawed, yet in many ways admirable, hero whose compelling personal struggle transcends the boundaries of race and time to exemplify the universal human yearning for dignity, acceptance and love in the face of seemingly insurmountable barricades.

Shortly after completing Fences in 1985, Wilson began to see that the three dramas he had written to date were actually the beginnings of an epic literary achievement that grew to include ten plays and is often dubbed the Century Cycle. As the ambitious project developed, Wilson began to deliberately weave his plays together with overlapping themes and characters. He told The New York Times in 2000, “I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society had thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.”

Each of the ten plays is set in a different decade of the 20th century, and all but one take place in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Wilson was born in 1945. In his introduction to the recently published August Wilson Century Cycle, critic John Lahr focuses on the playwright’s talent for transforming “historical tragedy into imaginative triumph. The blues are catastrophe expressed lyrically; so are Wilson’s plays, which swing with the pulse of the African-American people, as they moved, over the decades, from property to personhood.”

In decade order, Wilson’s “Century Cycle” plays are:

• 1900s - Gem of the Ocean (written 2003)
• 1910s - Joe Turner's Come and Gone (written 1984)
• 1920s - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (written 1982)
• 1930s - The Piano Lesson - Pulitzer Prize (written 1986)
• 1940s - Seven Guitars (written 1995)
• 1950s - Fences - Pulitzer Prize (written 1985)
• 1960s - Two Trains Running (written 1990)
• 1970s - Jitney (written 1982)
• 1980s - King Hedley II (written 2001)
• 1990s - Radio Golf (written 2005)

Fences was initially presented as a staged reading at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s 1983 National Playwrights Conference. It opened on April 30, 1985, at the Yale Repertory Theatre in a production directed by Lloyd Richards, and the following year, the Richards-helmed Broadway premiere won every major accolade, including the Tony Award for Best Play, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the John Gassner Outer Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That production, which featured James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson, ran for 525 performances and set a record for a non-musical Broadway production by grossing $11 million in a single year.

SCR’s dazzling cast for Fences features Charlie Robinson (Troy Maxson), Gregg Daniel (Jim Bono), Juanita Jennings (Rose), Brandon J. Dirden (Lyons), Baron Kelly (Gabriel), Larry Bates (Cory), Skye Whitebear and Sofya Ogunseitan (alternating as Raynell). Joining director Seret Scott’s creative ensemble are Set Designer Shawn Motley, Costume Designer Dana Woods, Lighting Designer Lonnie Alcaraz and Sound Designer Michael Roth.

Previews for Fences begin January 22nd and performances continue through February 21st on Segerstrom Stage. Theatre Discovery Project performances on January 26, 27, 28, February 2, 3, and 4 feature standards-based activities designed to enhance the educational value for students. As space is limited for these special events, interested teachers should contact the Box Office (714.708.5555) for group reservations.

Fences' Extended Family

TROY MAXSON - Charlie Robinson
Legendary Negro League Baseball player, now working as a garbage collector. Troy is a storyteller. He is at once jovial and loving, brash and overbearing. A complicated man embittered by the racism he has experienced throughout his life.

JIM BONO - Gregg Daniel
Troy’s very good friend. The men met while in prison, and Bono, as he is known, has stayed with Troy through his legendary days in baseball and today works beside him as a garbage man. Like brothers, the two men love each other deeply.

ROSE - Juanita Jennings
Troy’s wife. A strong, supportive woman who is fiercely protective of her husband and son. A loving presence who counterbalances Troy’s ferocity for life, Rose mothers almost everyone around her. She is quiet and laughs easily. A gentle spirit.

LYONS - Brandon J. Dirden
Troy’s eldest son from a previous relationship. Lyons is a musician who cannot seem to keep a job. He is full of laughter and uses his charming personality to quell his father’s quick anger. A grown man, he lives with his girlfriend nearby.

GABRIEL - Baron Kelly
Troy’s brother. After suffering severe head trauma in World War II, Gabriel is left with a childlike innocence and a deep sense of concern for his older brother. He believes with every fiber in his being that he is the archangel Gabriel.

CORY - Larry Bates
Troy and Rose’s son. Cory is a natural athlete like his father, eager to prove his salt to the legendary Troy Maxon. He has been playing football, hoping to catch the eyes of college recruiters, offering him the educational opportunities his illiterate father never had.

RAYNELL - Skye Whitebear and Sofya Ogunseitan
Troy’s daughter and youngest child from another relationship.

Character description reprinted from the excellent Fences Study Guide published by Penumbra Theatre Company in 2008 

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