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Fences, August Wilson's most popular play, opened on Broadway in 1987 with James Earl Jones in the starring role. It ran for 525 performances, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Tony Award for best play, and Mr. Wilson's first of two Pulitzer Prizes. Clive Barnes of the New York Post called it "the strongest, most passionate American dramatic writing since Tennessee Williams…Fences gave me one of the richest experiences I have ever had in the theater."
Theatre Intime in collaboration with the Black Arts Company has mounted a powerful and moving — though, like its main character, not unflawed — production, which provides vivid evidence of the poetry and drama that has won such well deserved acclaim for Fences. One of the great playwrights of American theater, Mr. Wilson, who died just five months ago, has left a cycle of masterpieces that chronicle the African-American experience in this country, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century (also including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), The Piano Lesson (1990) and Gem of the Ocean (2004), revived last fall at McCarter Theatre).
In the tradition of Arthur Miller — Death of a Salesman, in particular — where intense family conflict plays out its tragic drama against a background of potent destructive social forces, Fences is the story of African-American Troy Maxson (J. Paul Stephens), an ex-baseball player now a garbage man, fighting against racial oppression and personal demons, struggling for dignity, security, respectability against overwhelming adversities. This larger-than-life character may be a victim of the bleak world of the 1950s and the rundown neighborhood of the Pittsburgh Hill District in which the play is set, but Troy, an ex-convict, alcoholic, and father of children with three different mothers, is also a victim of his own bitterness, his personal excesses, and his wary detachment from family and friends.
The forces of discrimination and economic oppression that spark the anger and fuel the conflicts in Troy's life, most strikingly with his teen-aged son Cory (Christopher Inniss) and his wife Rose (L. Kelechi Ezie), will erupt on a national scale less than ten years later in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Early in the first of two acts Troy and Cory clash over Cory's hopes of winning a football scholarship to college. Troy, who hit 43 home runs in one season in the Negro Leagues but was born too soon to break the color barrier in the Major Leagues, distrusts the white man's enticements for Cory and also harbors his own resentment and jealousy of this opportunity that he never had. Cory, who is living in the huge shadow of his father, dashes off to football practice, defying Troy's orders to stick with his dependable job at the A&P. The conflict grows increasingly hostile.
August Wilson's Fences will play March 2 to March 4 at 8 p.m. and at 2 p.m. on March 4, at Murray Theater on the Princeton University campus. For tickets call (609) 258-1742 or visit www.princeton.edu/utickets.
The shattering of the fragile family structure is complete when Troy comes home, midway through the second act, to announce to Rose that he has fathered a child with another woman. The mother dies in childbirth, Troy brings the baby home and Rose finally agrees to care for the child. She announces "from right now…this child got a mother. But you a womanless man."
Under the direction of Princeton University sophomore Roger Q. Mason, the able cast, mostly undergraduates, is joined here by Mr. Stephens, a seasoned middle-aged professional, and by Lauren Belayneh, a talented seventh grader in the role of Troy's daughter Raynell.
Mr. Stephens provides a strong, convincing centerpiece for the action. James Earl Jones, in perhaps his greatest role, is not an easy act to follow (Rose describes Troy: "when (he) walked through the house he was so big he filled it up."), but Mr. Stephens successfully delivers the music of Wilson's rich, colorful, poetic language; he displays a warm humor and a gift for spellbinding story-telling; and though Troy is often not a likeable figure — cold, stern, harsh — he is able to engage the audience's sympathies in joy and love, in his frustrations, his anger, and his anguish.
Ms. Ezie, though making a character stretch of some 25 years, provides a convincing wife and commanding counterbalance to Troy's excesses, as she struggles to hold her marriage and family together.
Equally strong, though often forced into silence, is Mr. Inniss' Cory, a pivotal character, as he builds up the courage to face and ultimately forgive the uncompromising father he despaired of ever measuring up to.
Zennen Clifton as Troy's old friend Bono and Osei Kwakye as Troy's brother Gabriel, deranged from a war injury, provide solid support, though less than credible in making 30-year character stretches; while Jose Leonor effectively portrays the struggling musician Lyons, Troy's oldest son (from a previous marriage) — three more fascinating character creations who alternately support, test and trouble Troy in diverse ways.
Scott Grzenczyk's sturdy, realistic back porch set — with red paint peeling off the sides of the house, broken slats on the porch railing, clothesline, and eponymous fence — anchors the production firmly. William Ellerbe's lights help to establish the shifting tones and times of the nine successive scenes, and also, on occasion, move the play from the world of realism to surrealism as Troy attempts to battle his inner demons. Costumes designed by Anh-Thu Ngo and Alexis Okeowo are appropriate and on target in evoking the time, place and the individuality of the characters.
Mr. Mason has directed with intelligence and skill. Pacing drags at times, most notably in delays between scenes and in some overloading in Mr. Wilson's script, but the ensemble meshes smoothly, the dramatic tension remains taut throughout, and the conflicts come vividly to life.
"Jesus, be a fence all around me every day," Rose sings as she hangs out the laundry at the start of the second scene. The fence that Troy and his son Cory are building emerges on stage right and stage left as the action progresses. It becomes a symbol of the security and protection — from white America, from his own inner demons, from death itself — that Troy seeks during the course of the play. And it also represents the struggle to keep the family together against the forces that threaten to pull it apart. August Wilson's Fences, in this fine Theatre Intime/Black Arts Company production, bears eloquent witness to the beauty and value of that struggle and of the rich theatrical legacy Mr. Wilson has left us.