August Wilson S Fenc... by Ladrica Menson-Furr

August Wilson’s
Fences
Continuum Modern Theatre Guides
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Peter L. Hays and Kent Nicholson
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Aleks Sierz
Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls

Alicia Tycer
David Mamet’s Oleanna

David K. Sauer
Patrick Marber’s Closer

Graham Saunders
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Mark Taylor-Batty and Juliette Taylor-Batty
Sarah Kane’s Blasted

Helen Iball
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

John Fleming
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America

Ken Nielsen
Ladrica Menson-Furr
August Wilson’s
Fences
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Ladrica Menson-Furr 2008
Ladrica Menson-Furr has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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ISBN: 978-0-8264-9647-8 (hardback)

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Contents
General Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
1 Background and Context 1

2 Analysis and Commentary 17
3 Production History 50
4 Workshopping the Play 63
5 Conclusion 86
Timeline 1950–65 90
Further Reading 95
References 100
Index 105
General Preface
Continuum Modern Theatre Guides
Volumes in the series Continuum Modern Theatre Guides offer

concise and informed introductions to the key plays of modern
times. Each book takes a close look at one particular play’s drama-
turgical qualities and then at its various theatrical manifestations.
The books are carefully structured to offer a systematic study of
the play in its biographical, historical, social and political context,
followed by an in-depth study of the text and a chapter which out-
lines the work’s production history, examining both the original
productions of the play and subsequent major stage interpretations.
Where relevant, screen adaptations will also be analyzed. There then
follows a chapter dedicated to workshopping the play, based on
suggested group exercises. Also included are a timeline and sugges-
tions for further reading.
Each book covers:
z Background and context

z Analysis of the play
z Production history
z Workshopping exercises
The aim is to provide accessible introductions to modern plays for

students in both Theatre/Performance Studies and English, as well
as for informed general readers. The series includes up-to-date cov-
erage of a broad range of key plays, with summaries of important
General Preface vii
critical approaches and the intellectual debates that have illumi-

nated the meaning of the work and made a significant contribution
to our broader cultural life. They will enable readers to develop their
understanding of playwrights and theatre-makers, as well as inspir-
ing them to broaden their studies.
The Editors:
Steve Barfield, Janelle Reinelt,
Graham Saunders and Aleks Sierz
March 2008
Acknowledgements
I would like to begin by thanking the series editors and Continuum

Press for affording me is opportunity. I must also express my extreme
gratitude to Harry Elam, Jr for recommending for this project. I am
extremely grateful to you all.
I would also like thank the August Wilson scholars, especially
Sandra Shannon and Joan Herrington, who have served as my
mentors. Your work has served as the foundation of scholarly
endeavors.
I could not have completed this text without the support
and guidance of my fences – my family, friends, and colleagues:
Mark, Morgan and Madeline Furr, Gwendolyn Menson, Gail Furr
and Gary Woolnough, Cheryl, Allen, Shaydra, and Shallene Joseph,
Belinda S. Hodges, Pamela Segrest, Ruth Burkes, Father Colenzo
Hubbard, Cassandra Turner, Verner Mitchell, Reginald Martin,
Rebecca Argall, William Demastes, Reginald Brown, Verlinda
Franklin, Carlotta Jones, Yvonne Draper, Susan Fitzgerald, Trellis
Morgan, Lori Cohoon, Sarah Keith, Jervette Ward, Darrin Miller
and Jonathan Wallace. I could not have completed any of this with-
out you.
Janelle Reinhelt, Colleen Coalter and Anna Sandeman, thank
you for all of your guidance and patience. I am indebted to you all.
All quotations from August Wilson’s Fences copyright © 1986 by
August Wilson appear with kind permission from Dutton Signet,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Ladrica Menson-Furr
Memphis, June 2008
1 Background and Context
This chapter will serve as a preliminary introduction to the study of

August Wilson’s Fences. It explains why the play is important, gives
a sketch of Wilson’s life, and discusses the social, economic and
political background of the play.
Introduction
On 16 October 2005, New York City’s historic Broadway theatre
district added a new page to its annals and a new marquee to its
locality. On this day, the former Virginia Theatre was renamed to
honor the most celebrated African-American dramatist of the
twentieth and early twenty-first century, August Wilson. The story
of how this gentleman rose from obscurity to the Great White Way
(Broadway’s nickname) has been and will be told throughout dra-
matic and literary history, with particular emphasis on his entire
dramatic canon, and especially on the drama Fences. Set in the
Pittsburgh Hill District in 1957, Fences confirmed Wilson’s pres-
ence in American mainstream theatre, and continued his journey
towards Broadway immortality. Like the play’s main character, Troy
Maxson, Wilson’s Fences has a wonderful history that simultane-
ously relays and reflects its significance within the records of
American and world drama.
August Wilson’s Fences was first produced in 1985 at the Yale
Repertory Theatre under the directorial eye of Lloyd Richards. This
production was the second of six works on which Wilson and
Richards collaborated, and it contributed to the playwright being
seen by some as ‘America’s greatest playwright’ and the ‘American
2 August Wilson’s Fences
Shakespeare’. After the production of this play at Yale, Chicago’s

Goodman Theatre, the Seattle Repertory Theatre and in San
Francisco, Fences opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre on
26 March 1987. Fences, however, is not only important because it
secured Wilson’s presence on Broadway, but also because it proved
that another African-American playwright could meet the challenge
and compose a traditional drama – one that revolved around the
actions of one character – and write both himself and a new
African-American protagonist, Troy Maxson, into the annals of
American theatre alongside timeless characters such as Arthur
Miller’s Willie Loman and Lorraine Hansberry’s Walter Lee Younger.
Fences also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (the second African-
American authored drama to win this award), the New York Drama
Critics’ Circle Award, and four Tony awards (Best Actor: James Earl
Jones; Best Actress: Mary Alice; Best Director: Lloyd Richards;
and Best Play). Moreover, the drama demonstrated the universality
of Wilson’s African-American centered characters and cultures.
Fences is a play about father–son conflict, marital challenges, respon-
sibility and forgiveness. It is a drama that, as its opening words
state, exposes and simultaneously exorcises the sins of the father.
Wilson writes, ‘When the sins of our fathers visit us/We do not
have to play host./We can banish them with forgiveness/As God, in
His Largeness and Laws’ (Wilson, 1985: 95). With these words he
instructs his audiences to recognize their fathers’ human frailties
and seek a way to forgive and understand them.
Despite its numerous accolades, multi-million dollar earnings,
and continued celebrated status, Fences was Wilson’s ‘least favorite
play’ (Williams and Shannon, 2004: 194) and the work that he con-
sidered to be the ‘odd man out’ of his cycle of dramas. Thirteen days
before Fences’s Broadway opening, Wilson explained to David
Savran that Fences was ‘the odd one [play], more conventional in
structure with its large character’ (Savran, 1987: 30). He added that
he wrote it in order to combat the criticism that Fences’s predecessor,
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, had an ‘oddly structured’ plot. Similarly,
Background and Context 3
Wilson told Dennis Watlington that Fences was not the type of play
that he ‘wanted to write,’ but after telling people that he could com-
pose a more conventional play, he wrote Fences in order to prove to
himself that he could (Watlington, 1989: 88). In 1993, 6 years after
its successful Broadway run, Wilson reassessed Fences as the odd
man out and asserted that:
If you pull Fences out, a more natural progression of my work

would have been from Ma Rainey to Joe Turner to The Piano
Lesson. And yet Fences can also be the fulcrum, the centerpiece,
the thing upon which everything turns. In other words, if you’re
fashioning a chain or something, I’m not sure that Fences should
necessarily be the odd man out. Maybe we need another similar
kind of play that would balance it or complement it . . .. My
challenge now would be to write another one, to find a character
that is as representative of black America in the eighties as Troy
was in the fifties. (Richard Pettengill, 1993: 167)
Thus, Fences began as a challenge, yet became the centerpiece of

the ten-play cycle that he would conclude with Radio Golf.
About the play’s author

In artistic and literary eyes, the month of April is associated with
rebirth, regeneration, the color green, the warmth of the sun, the
melting of the snow and the promise of spring. Frederick August
Kittel was born in the spring of 1945, on 27 April in the ethnically
diverse Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Hill District
of 1945 reflected the after effects of the Great Migration of African
Americans from the South to North and the immigration of
German, Italian and Irish people into the United States. The first
ethnic group to settle in the Hill District was comprised of Jewish
emigrants, between 1870 and 1890, ‘followed by Italians, Greeks,
Syrians, and Poles’ (Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance, 1977: 2).
African Americans began to settle in this area as early as the 1880s
and on through the 1960s in search of the better jobs, educational

opportunities for their children, and to escape the increasing disen-
franchisement and segregation legislation (known as Jim Crow
Laws) that dominated much of the American South from the 1890s
until the Civil Rights Movement began in the 1950s. Kittel’s par-
ents, Daisy Wilson Kittel, an African-American domestic worker,
and Frederick Kittel, a German baker, raised him and his five sib-
lings in the Hill District and in the Pittsburgh suburb of Hazelwood.
Later, Daisy Wilson and her children returned to the Hill District,
and Frederick August Kittel adopted his mother’s maiden name and
became known as August Wilson.
While little is known about Wilson’s father, most biographers
have noted his red hair and his frequent absences from the Kittel
household. While Wilson explored father–son conflicts in his
works, particularly in Fences and Jitney, his dramas do not explicitly
explore the issue of the missing German father. Film and stage actor
and director Charles Dutton, speaking at the 2005 Situating August
Wilson in the Canon and in the Curriculum Symposium (hosted
by Dr Sandra Shannon and Howard University), noted that this
aspect of Wilson’s life has not been explored. I assume that Dutton
means that Wilson, at least dramatically, had not explored the reali-
ties of interracial families (Menson-Furr, 2005: conference notes).
Hence, Wilson’s dramatic world is not a complete representation of
his life (nor should it be). More, however, is known about Wilson’s
stepfather, David Bedford, who became one of many surrogate
fathers who helped to shape the young Frederick Kittel’s masculine
self. Wilson’s mother, Daisy Wilson Kittel Bedford, also remains
largely an anonymous figure in Wilson’s biographies, but her pres-
ence and her teachings loom large in Kittel’s/Wilson’s evolution
from man-child to man.
August Wilson completed his education within the school of
urban, American realism. In 1959, he left Central Catholic High
School, where he was the only black student, because of numerous
threats and abuse. One year later, the 15-year-old Wilson ‘resigned’
from the Pittsburgh educational system after being accused of
plagiarizing a 20-page essay on Napoleon. Wilson then turned to
Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library, particularly its Negro Section, where
he read the works of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and Richard
Wright (Wolfe, 1999: 2). He also immersed himself in the pool
halls, restaurants, and streets of the Hill District, and, as some
Wilson-scholars state, earned his high school and college credentials
within their walls. Wilson’s Hill District experiences, lessons and
teachers provided him with models for many of the characters,
stories and subjects that dominate his dramatic works.
Between 1962 and 1963, Wilson enlisted and served in the
United States Army. Following his discharge, he worked various
odd jobs including stints as a porter, a short-order cook, a gardener
and dishwasher. He also began writing poetry, inspired by Dylan
Thomas, his favorite poet.
In 1965, at the age of 20, August Wilson began writing for
the stage. In the same year, Frederick Kittel died, and his son
Frederick August Kittel changed his name to August Wilson. He
moved into a rooming house on Pittsburgh’s Bedford Avenue, and
began his writing career as poet with the purchase of his first type-
writer (for 20 dollars). Wilson also discovered the blues and Bessie
Smith’s ‘Nobody Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine’ after pur-
chasing a record player and a stack of blues records. He fondly relays
this story and the affects of the blues on both him his work:
In 1965, as a twenty-year-old poet living in a rooming house

in Pittsburgh, I discovered Bessie Smith and the blues. It was a
watershed event in my life. It gave me a history. It provided me
with a cultural response to the world as well as the knowledge
that the text and content of my life were worthy of the highest
celebration and occasion of art. It also gave me a framework and
an aesthetic for exploring the tradition from which it grew. I set
out on a continual search for ways to give expression to the

spiritual impulse of the African-American culture which had
nurtured and sanctioned my life and ultimately provided it with
its meaning. I was, as are all artists, searching for a way to define
myself in relation to the world I lived in. The blues gave me
a firm and secure ground. It became, and remains, the wellspring
of my art. (Wilson, 1990 in Romare Bearden: His Life and Art :
8 ‘Foreword’)
The musical genre of the blues is integral to understanding

Wilson’s dramatic perspective and his dramatic/cultural philosophy.
The blues became one of Wilson’s first dramatic influences and the
literal soundtrack of his planned and completed ten-play cycle.
In 1968, Wilson and his friend Rob Penny founded the Black
Horizons Theater company. The Black Horizons Theater emerged
in the midst of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic movement which
would yield Wilson his second dramatic influence – the work
of Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones). ‘Baraka’s influence,’ according to
Wilson, ‘has less to do with the way that he writes and more to do
with the ideas that he espoused in the ’60s as a black nationalist –
ideas that I found value in then and still find value in’ (Shannon,
1993: 554).
Wilson’s playwrighting career began in earnest in 1973, when he
wrote his first play, Recycle, and in 1976 his play, The Homecoming,
was directed by Vernell Little for the Kuntu Repertory Theatre. Also
in this year, Wilson watched Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, the first profes-
sionally staged play he had seen, and encountered another influence
on his work, South-African dramatist Athol Fugard. He composed
a musical satire, ‘Black Bart and the Sacred Hills’, in 1977 and
moved to St Paul, Minnesota a year later where he wrote children’s
plays for the Minnesota Science Museum. During this time Wilson
also wrote the play Jitney (1979), the only one of his dramas written
during the decade of its setting. While Wilson’s dramatic cycle was
greatly influenced by the blues and the nationalistic perspectives of

Amiri Baraka and Athol Fugard, his strongest visual inspiration was
found within the works of visual artist Romare Bearden, whom he
considered a mentor. The play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and the
characters Seth and Bertha Holly were inspired by Bearden’s col-
lages ‘Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket’ and ‘Mr Seth and Miss Bertha’,
and the title of The Piano Lesson came from Bearden’s collage of the
same name. Wilson first encountered Bearden’s work in The Preva-
lence of Ritual, a printed collection of his art works, placed on a
table at the home of his friend, Claude Purdy:
In 1977 . . . I discovered the art of Romare Bearden. My friend . . .

had purchased a copy of The Prevalence of Ritual, and one night,
in the Fall of 1977, after dinner and much talk, he laid it open
on the table before me. ‘Look at this’, he said. ‘Look at this’.
I looked. What for me had been so difficult, Bearden made seem
so simple, so easy. What I saw was black life presented on its
own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and
fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attend-
ant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted
its presence. . . . In Bearden I found my artistic mentor and
sought, and still aspire, to make my plays the equal of his can-
vases . . . (Wilson, 1990: 8–9)
August Wilson’s playwriting talents continued to be honed dur-

ing the 1980s, when he was awarded a Fellowship at the Minneapolis
Playwrights Center (1980) and witnessed Jitney’s staging in Pittsburgh
at the Allegheny Repertory Theatre. Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom was accepted by the National Playwrights Conference at the
O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut in 1982. This play became
Wilson’s first commercially successful drama and began his six-play
collaboration with former O’Neill Center chief and Dean of the
Yale School of Drama, Lloyd Richards.
From 1984 to 2005, August Wilson’s dramas and name rose

from obscurity to critical acclaim. After the successful Yale Reper-
tory Theatre, regional theatre and Broadway runs of Ma Rainey’s
Black Bottom, Wilson composed the dramas Fences, Joe Turner’s
Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Seven Gui-
tars, Jitney (revised), King Hedley II, Gem of the Ocean and lastly
Radio Golf.
August Wilson was diagnosed with liver cancer on 16 June 2005.
He died at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, on
2 October 2005. Wilson’s life reads like one of his great stage dra-
mas and reflects the success of the American dream – the American
dramatic dream – of an African-American male born in 1945. In
the autumn of his life, Wilson was able to witness the completion
of his cycle of plays – his plan and his goal. He completed his
historic fence of twentieth-century African-American dramatic his-
tory and left the gate open for all of us to enter.
The social, economic and political context

Wilson offers an historical and political contextualization for
Fences in the section ‘The Play’ in the published text: ‘By 1957, the
hard-won victories of the European immigrants had solidified the
industrial might of America. War had been confronted and won
with new energies that used loyalty and patriotism as its fuel. Life
was rich, full, and flourishing’ (103). By 1957, America had fought
and won two wars – World War I and World War II – and had con-
tinued to construct itself into a Western ‘super power’. The country’s
president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, began radical changes within
the social infrastructure at home, especially as the walls of southern
segregatory laws began to crumble following the United States
Supreme Court’s historic 1954 ruling in the Brown vs. the Topeka
Board of Education case, in which they reversed the ‘separate but
equal’ legislation that had pervaded the South. President Eisen-
hower declared that ‘there must be no second class citizens in this
country’ (www.whitehouse.gov). He ordered the complete desegre-

gation of the American Armed Forces and sent Federal Troops to
Little Rock, Arkansas, to make certain that the state complied with
Federal Law and to protect the students who would be christened
‘The Little Rock Nine’ and become the first black students to enroll
at Little Rock’s Central High School (www.whitehouse.gov). Hence,
Wilson situates Fences among the winds of change that propel Troy
Maxson, a native southerner, to ask Mr Rand, his white employer,
the simple questions, ‘Why? Why you got the white mens driving
and the colored lifting?’ (106). After following Rand’s instructions
to ‘take it to the union’ (106), Troy migrates from the back of the
truck as a garbage can lifter, to the front of the truck as a driver.
For African Americans, the 1950s were still wrought with contin-
ued discrimination, disenfranchisement and political and economic
strife. African-American men had now served in two world wars,
but following both battles they returned to a country that contin-
ued to judge them by the color of their skin. The second wave of
the Great Migration began during this time as African Americans
began to migrate both to the West and the North. More and more
African Americans began to fight for economic and political rights
by organizing, boycotting businesses that refused to serve them, and
staging protest marches and sit-ins. However, it must be noted that
African Americans did not begin these revolutionary activities in the
1950s. Historians have documented that during the Transatlantic
slave trade and period of American Slavery (1619–1865), African
Americans organized, battled their oppressors, and fought – physically
and legally – for the rights to vote, educate their children, purchase
their family members and own land. Thus, by the 1950s, African
Americans had inherited a long legacy of activism that began in
the twentieth century with African-American leaders (often called
‘race men’ and ‘race women’) such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T.
Washington, James Weldon Johnson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary
McLeod Bethune, who were fighting for equality and basic human
rights in both the North and the South.
The decade of the 1950s was also the grandchild of the Harlem
Renaissance and its ‘New Negro’, the new generation of African-
American artists and intellectuals emerging in the 1920s (Alain
Locke, 1925: 960–70). The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic and
political movement that celebrated African-American art, music,
dance and literature alongside strategies for social and political
uplift. The movement aimed to demonstrate, in the words of Har-
lem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, that African Americans did
‘too, sing America’ (Hughes, 1925, 1959: 1295).
Fences is set two years before the debut of Lorraine Hansberry’s
groundbreaking A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway (1959) and three
years prior to the beginning of the American Black Arts Movement
(1960s). Wilson reminds his audience, ‘the hot winds of change
that would make the sixties a turbulent, racing, dangerous, and pro-
vocative decade had not yet begun to blow full’ (104). Troy Maxson’s
demand for equality and the play’s powerful illustration of African-
American manhood is only a minute foreshadowing of the eruptions
that occurred during the decade of the 1960s. Indicative of the
turbulence and violence, President John F. Kennedy (1963) and
African-American leaders Malcolm X (1964) and Martin Luther
King, Jr (1968) were assassinated.
Wilson begins Fences at the turn of the twentieth century and
traces the evolution of Pittsburgh’s population from European
immigrants to the masses of African Americans who would find
their way from the American South to the American North as they
participated in what is now known as The Great Migration. The
(first) Great Migration took place between 1916 and 1930. Angry,
frightened, disenfranchised, and disappointed by the false promises
of emancipation and the continued antagonism of segregation, the
Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow, African Americans moved away
from the South in search of a better life, one free of the burden of
southern racial discrimination. Approximately 1.5 million African
Americans moved from the southern states of Tennessee, Alabama,
Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana to the nearest northern states,
such as Ohio and Illinois, and then further northward into Pennsyl-
vania, Michigan and New York. These migrants walked, drove and
rode the northern bound trains in search of the promises of the North,
yet many found the North to be a challenging terrain to traverse –
racially, economically and environmentally. As Wilson explained:
The city rejected them, and they fled and settled along the river-
banks and under bridges in shallow, ramshackle houses made of
sticks and tar-paper. They collected rags and wood. They sold the
use of their muscles and their bodies. They cleaned houses and
washed clothes, they shined shoes, and in quiet desperation and
vengeful pride, they stole and lived in pursuit of their own
dream: That they could breathe free, finally, and stand to meet
life with the force of dignity and whatever eloquence the heart
could call upon. (103)
This group of Pittsburgh residents not only became the focus of

Fences, but also of eight additional Wilson plays, that would fit-
tingly comprise what has been identified as the ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’
(Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson,
Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, Jitney, King Hedley II, and Radio
Golf ). Fences is the first commercially produced Wilson drama to
introduce the character and strengths of this group of individuals
that survived life in a country that used their bodies, and then refused
to embrace them as its own.
Wilson’s twentieth-century cycle

Each play of August Wilson’s twentieth-century cycle presents
an episode from each decade of the African-American experience
between the years 1900 and 2000 (specifically 1904–1995). An
interdisciplinary amalgam of African-American history, sociology,
musicology and literature, each play within the cycle offers its
audiences the opportunity to begin to understand the emotional,
psychological and physical effects that African Americans harbor,
consciously and unconsciously, from both the African continent

and the American homeland. Wilson’s cycle also serves as a conduit
to the African continent, by way of the American South, the place
that Wilson viewed as the African-American’s first point of origin.
The cycle’s intent is to celebrate the uniqueness of African-American
culture and its people, its survivors, and specifically to recognize
that African Americans are humans who possess the capacity to
harm, be harmed, hurt and heal just as all other beings. Interestingly,
Wilson began composing his cycle of plays by way of ‘coincidence’.
He explained to Sandra Shannon that he ‘didn’t start out with a
grand idea’ to compose a cycle. Instead, he tells Shannon, ‘I wrote
a play called Jitney! set in ’71, and a play called Fullerton Street that
I set in ’41. Then I wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which I set in
’27, and it was after I did that I said, “I’ve written three plays in
three different decades, so why don’t I just continue to do that?”’
(Shannon, 1991: 120). Thus, as Wilson composed dramas that
reached back into the history of his people, he identified a course
that had already been chartered for him by the experiences of Afri-
can Americans through their histories. He became the medium for
these voices and their stories.
Wilson’s twentieth-century cycle, although including a play reflect-
ing each decade in the twentieth century, was not written in chrono-
logical order. Thus, the following discussion of the plays will trace the
cycle as it was composed and, with the exception of Jitney, produced.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), set in 1927, was Wilson’s first
commercially successful drama and examined the blues and the blues
musicians who comprised the band of the famous blues songstress
Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey. This drama illustrates Wilson’s signature
ensemble play style enhanced with major Wilsonian monologues
that make his characters and their words into distinctive voices.
Filled with music, history and important reminders about the
exploitation of blues performers, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom both
resurrects the ‘sass’ and business acumen possessed by the historical
Madame Rainey, and enables Wilson’s blues men to articulate their
blues to a wide theatre audience. Under the direction of Lloyd

Richards, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom opened on Broadway at the
Cort Theatre on 11 October 1984. The play was revived in 2003
at the Royale Theatre, running from 22 January to 6 April 2003,
starring Whoopi Goldberg as Gertrude ‘Ma Rainey’ and Charles
Dutton reviving his original performance as Levee.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988), set in 1914, followed the
same regional theatre path as Fences, and was written and work-
shopped while Fences was being performed on Broadway. This
drama, the second play in the cycle from the standpoint of chronol-
ogy, takes its audiences back in time to the first wave of the Great
Migration to follow the trails of the numerous southerners migrat-
ing away from the Jim Crow South towards the promises of the
great, industrial northern cities. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone blends
both the African and African-American pasts, and the southern and
northern migrants’ quests for an identity into a complex drama that
requires its audiences to understand the long-term repercussions of
slavery, the Reconstruction period and the Great Migration.
In several interviews Wilson identified Joe Turner’s Come and
Gone as his favorite play, and the play that should have logically fol-
lowed Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Returning to the ensemble cast, this
drama combines African-American folklore, a West African ring
shout dance called the Juba, and a very complex clash of African
spirituality, Christianity and ‘conjuring’. Joe Turner’s Come and
Gone illustrated Wilson’s determination to reclaim the Africanness
of the African-American past, and to demonstrate the effects of
nineteenth-century slavery and twentieth-century slavery/indentured
servitude on many African-American men.
The Piano Lesson (1990), inspired by the collage of the same
name created by Romare Bearden, continues Wilson’s discussions
of legacies, family and the importance of acknowledging and
embracing the past in order to exist in the present and future. While
Fences centers on a father–son conflict, The Piano Lesson examines
a brother–sister conflict and the question of ‘How does one build
upon his/her legacy?’ At the center of this drama is, as its title
discloses, a piano that holds separate, but communal, meanings for
the Charles family. Thus far, The Piano Lesson is the only play in the
cycle that has been adapted for film or television. Wilson composed
the Hallmark Hall of Fame’s teleplay for the adaptation, and the
production included most of the original Broadway cast.
Two Trains Running (1992), set in 1968, following the assassina-
tions of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X, ‘picks up the
ball’ of Wilson’s works and continues to ask the question of what
do we do with our legacies. At this point in Wilson’s dramatic his-
tory, blacks are continuing to fight for their Civil Rights, but they
have in many instances forgotten who they are and where they
come from. With the leaders towards progress gone, the African-
American struggle may regress if its members don’t, in the words of
the mystical Aunt Ester, ‘You got to go back and pick up the ball’
(Wilson, 1993: 109), reclaiming their histories, their identities and
themselves. Two Trains Running, like each of Wilson’s early works,
continues the blues theme, especially in its title, which refers to the
physical trains moving back and forth between the North and South
weekly, while also evoking the train’s presence that is imperative to
blues music.
The play Seven Guitars (1996) follows some of the techniques of
Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. According to Joan Herrington,
‘Borges and Wilson are more concerned with how things happen
than with what actually happens. Wilson was specifically influenced
by Borges’s technique of revealing the ending of his stories in the
first lines, which forces the reader to focus on the process and not
the outcome’ (Herrington, 1998: 4). As a result of this influence, in
Seven Guitars the end of the play is the play’s beginning, and the
plot unfolds through flashbacks to the life and the events preceding
the death of the blues musician Floyd ‘School Boy’ Barton. Wilson
says that he was ‘fascinated with the way Borges . . . tells a story . . .
He tells you exactly what is going to happen, even though the
outcome may seem improbable . . . See, if you write a play like that,
the audience will be just intrigued with trying to . . . So then you

become intrigued just sitting there trying to figure it out’ (Shannon,
1993: 554–55).
Jitney, set in 1971, was the first of Wilson’s twentieth-century
cycle plays and the only drama that was written during the decade
in which it was set. Written in 1979, Jitney was rejected twice by the
Eugene O’Neill Center before Wilson wrote Ma Rainey’s Black
and Bottom and it was the seventh play to be staged. Jitney revisits
the father–son conflict theme that would be introduced in Fences
and illuminates the entrepreneurial spirit possessed by many of
Wilson’s disenfranchised warrior characters. Centered upon a Jitney
cab operation, owned and managed by Becker and staffed by several
independent contractors, Jitney asks and answers Marvin Gaye’s
musical question of the 1970s, ‘What’s Goin’ On?’ and continues
Two Trains Running’s advice to ‘pick up the ball’ (Wilson, 1993:
109) despite your past. Jitney, like most of Wilson’s dramas, con-
cludes with death, but from each death the sprit of hope emerges
for both the audience and at least one character on the stage.
Jitney was also the only Wilson drama that was not produced
on Broadway. Instead, after being produced at numerous regional
theatres, Jitney began its New York run Off-Broadway at the Second
Stage Theatre, opening on 25 April 2000 and then migrated to
Off-Broadway’s larger Union Square Theatre where it re-opened on
19 September 2000. Jitney was directed by Marion McClinton
(who later directed the television version of The Piano Lesson).
King Hedley II (1998), set in 1985, is arguably the sequel to
Wilson’s Seven Guitars and his second attempt to compose a drama
that centered on one character. Directed by Marion McClinton,
King Hedley II follows the life and frustrations of Ruby’s son and
Hedley’s namesake, King Hedley II, as he attempts to secure the
American Dream in 1985. Surviving in the midst of rising black-
on-black crime, especially between young black men, and a legacy
of economic disenfranchisement and incarceration, King finds
himself at odds with his wife, mother, friends, neighbors and the
world at large. Like all of Wilson’s plays, King Hedley II is a tragedy

that ends with a death, King’s death, but also suggests that the
spilled blood or lost life might help to create a different legacy. King
Hedley II opened at Broadway’s Virginia Theatre on 1 May 2001.
Gem of the Ocean (2003), set in 1904, is the drama that chrono-
logically begins Wilson’s twentieth-century cycle. Formally intro-
ducing the character of Aunt Ester who is first introduced in Two
Trains Running and King Hedley II, the drama illustrates Wilson’s
ability to connect the African past with the African American pres-
ence in America and the twentieth century. In this drama, 287 year
old Aunt Ester helps the troubled Citizen Barlow reconnect to his his-
tory as an African in America so that he may find his identity and life’s
purpose. Directed by Kenny Leon, the drama opened at Broadway’s
Walter Kerr Theatre on December 6, 2004, but closed on February 6,
2005 after 15 preview performances and 72 regular performances
(Simonson, 2005: www.playbill.com 06 February 2005).
Radio Golf (2007) is the right-side ‘bookend’ of August Wilson’s
American cycle dramas. This play returns to Aunt Ester’s 1839
Wylie Avenue residence, now a dilapidated edifice, and, fittingly,
reflects on the state of African-American culture and Aunt Ester’s
descendants at the cusp of the twenty-first century. Continuing
Wilson’s focus on African-American cultural legacies, Radio Golf ’s
main character, Harmon Wilkes, has benefited from the progress
that Wilson’s characters have made since the 1904 set Gem of the
Ocean, but he has become disconnected from his past, his ancestors
and the very spirit of Aunt Ester. Instead of ending in tragedy, this
drama ends with a celebration as Harmon Wilkes, Aunt Ester’s
descendant, ‘picks up the paintbrush’ and, instead of demolishing
her home, joins the movement to preserve it and his cultural legacy.
Radio Golf opened on 8 May 2007 at Broadway’s Cort Theatre.
Directed by Kenny Leon, Radio Golf won the New York Drama
Critics’ Circle award for Best American Play. It received four TONY
award nominations, and nominations from the Drama Desk, Drama
League and Outer Critics Circle.
2 Analysis and Commentary
This chapter is a study of Fences both as a dramatic text and as a

performed play that has excited comment and provoked analysis.
Although plot summaries are often seen as old-fashioned, they are
useful in sketching out the action of the play before undertaking
a broader analysis of its characters, influences, images, themes and
key scenes.
Plot summary
Fences begins in 1957, and chronicles the last 8 years in the life
of its protagonist, Troy Maxson, and the effects of his decisions
and actions upon his family. Maxson is one of the many southern
migrants who struggled to forge a place for himself in the North,
specifically in the Pittsburgh Hill District. In the play’s exposition
we learn that, at the age of 14, Troy Maxson walked 200 miles to
Mobile, Alabama, and joined a group of southern migrants heading
North. Once he reached the North, Troy, like many African-American
transplants, found few if any of the promises that the destination
promised. He was forced to steal in order to eat, and then after
meeting the woman who would become his first wife and fathering
a son, Lyons, he was forced to steal to feed three mouths. While
stealing to feed his family, Troy commits murder and is sentenced to
15 years in the state penitentiary. In the penitentiary Troy discovers
the sport that he would use to explain his life, baseball, and after
his release, he plays for a time in the American Negro Baseball
League. During his incarceration, his first wife moved on without
him; however, his luck improved when he met the woman who
would become his second wife, Rose. Together, they have created a
second opportunity for Troy to live a semblance of the American
dream – a family, a home and a job – complete with a second son,
Cory.
Act One, Scene One

The action of the play begins on a Friday in 1957. It is pay day for
Troy Maxson and his long-time friend, Jim Bono. During this
weekly ritual of celebrating the ‘eagle’s flying’ (a colloquial phrase
that means pay day), Troy and Bono share a pint of whiskey and
Troy, through ‘tall talk’, slips into and out of the role of storyteller
as he verbally vacillates between his present actions and his past.
Wilson’s stage directions aptly explain the crux of this scene which
is dominated largely by Troy’s perspectives on work, life, death and
love: ‘TROY is fifty-three years old, a large man with thick, heavy
hands: it is this largeness that strives to fill out and make an accom-
modation with. Together with his blackness, his largeness informs his
sensibilities and the choices he has made in his life’ (105).
This scene introduces Bono (Troy’s friend of three decades), Rose
(Troy’s devoted wife), Lyons (Troy’s son from his first marriage)
and Troy’s voice as a character who attempts to control everyone’s
perceptions. Troy has an audience, and he offers them an excellent
one-man show in which he depicts an activist-trash collector, a war-
rior who was bold enough to fight with death and win, a human
who met the devil and lived to tell about it, and an intellectual who
can analyze and question the concept of time as it applies to and
controls a man’s desires.
In this scene, Troy illustrates his opinionated contrariness as he
shuns his second son’s, Cory’s, possibilities for an athletic scholar-
ship, dismisses the fact that age prevented him from playing baseball
professionally, and lastly, criticizes Lyons’s desire to live as a focused
musician who thinks it is okay to borrow money from his father
Analysis and Commentary 19
and live off of his woman. Beyond Troy’s storytelling, this scene

reaches its pinnacle during the drama’s first conflict – a verbal
between Troy and Lyons.
Lyons has come to borrow money from his father, but before
he can secure the loan he has to listen to Troy’s evaluation of his
character. Lyons’s response to his father foreshadows the image of
Troy Maxson that will evolve in the play’s remaining scenes. Lyons
sees nothing wrong with his decisions, but Troy thinks that scolding
his adult son will encourage him to reform. Lyons, however, reminds
Troy that he is too old to change, and that Troy was absent during
his youth. Hence, Troy’s opinion is invalid. Troy offers Lyons sound
advice, but Lyons’s response reminds Troy and everyone witnessing
this exchange that, as Lyons states, ‘You and me is two different
people, Pop,’ and that Troy’s proscriptions about life and work are a
‘day late and dollar short’ (119). Troy loses this father–son conflict,
but he brushes away this loss and returns to his ‘manly banter’.
Act One, Scene Two

This scene begins the next morning, Saturday, with Rose in the
yard hanging laundry on the clothesline and singing an African-
American spiritual that contains the drama’s titular metaphor:
‘Jesus, be a fence all around me everyday . . .’ (122). Troy enters
the scene from the house in a contentious mood. Rose thinks he is
concerned about his talk with Mr Rand, his supervisor, but Troy
denies this concern. Gabriel, Troy’s brother and one of Wilson’s
most fascinating spectacle characters, enters the drama in this scene
and ushers in a compelling sub-plot. (Wilson’s spectacle characters
are characters who appear to sit on the periphery of sanity, but who,
along with his plot’s main protagonist, often motivate the plot’s
action and offer the drama’s most insightful and compelling per-
spectives.) Gabriel, a disabled war veteran, believes that he has died,
gone to heaven and has been reincarnated as the Archangel Gabriel.
He enters the drama and informs Troy that St Peter has his name
(and Rose’s) written in his book. When Rose instructs him to go

inside the house so that she may prepare a proper meal for him, he
refuses because he has to keep peddling his wares so that he can
save up enough money to purchase a new horn ‘so St Peter can hear
me when it’s time to open the gates’ (127). Gabriel exits this scene
singing a spiritual with the refrain, ‘Better get ready for the judg-
ment . . . My God is coming down’ (127).
After Gabriel’s departure, Rose and Troy discuss Gabriel’s physi-
cal and mental state. Rose tells Troy that Gabriel would be better
cared for in a hospital, but Troy defends his brother’s right to inde-
pendence, especially since he was wounded while serving in his
country’s armed forces. Troy’s contentious mood returns because he
is embarrassed and angered as the only reason he has a home is
because he benefited from his brother’s veteran’s benefits. He would
not have anything if it were not for Gabriel’s war induced madness.
This scene concludes with a frustrated Troy headed for Taylor’s Bar
to listen to a baseball game.
Act One, Scene Three

This scene takes place 4 hours later, on the same Saturday. Rose is in
the yard removing clothing from the clothesline when Cory returns
from football practice. She informs him that Troy is upset with him
for not completing his morning chores, and suggests that he quickly
change his clothing, eat and get to work before his father returns
from Taylor’s. After Cory enters the house, Troy enters the yard. He
is in a jovial mood, and affectionately chases Rose around. He then
summons Cory to begin his Saturday chore: constructing the fence.
Father and son are now alone in the yard, but what begins as a poi-
gnant father–son moment in which Troy advises Cory about good
financial practices and even makes a deal with him to purchase
a television set, quickly becomes a father–son conflict. Troy begins
scolding Cory for neglecting his chores in favor of football. He does
not support Cory’s reverence for football because he fears that
Cory will be exploited by the white-controlled sports industry.

Also, because of his missed opportunity to play in the integrated
professional baseball league, he does not want Cory to buy into
the pipe dream that professional sports often offers to black men.
Instead, Troy wants Cory to continue to excel in school, retain his
job at the local A&P, and after graduation find a solid career with
A&P or in a trade.
Troy’s tirade continues after Cory, innocently, asks him, ‘How
come you ain’t never liked me?’ (135). Instead of eliciting the expected
sympathetic response, Troy morphs into a cruel and seemingly
unloving parent who instead of making his son feel loved, uses this
question to teach him a crude, but valid, lesson about responsibility
and fairness. Troy’s advice is sound, but his delivery is venomous
and leaves Cory feeling rejected.
Rose overhears this exchange and tries to explain to Troy that
Cory wants to know that Troy is proud of him. Troy, as he did with
Lyons, offers sound but cruelly delivered wisdom when he says that
he wants Cory to be better than he is, both professionally and
humanely. Instead of apologizing to Rose or Cory for his behavior,
this scene concludes with Troy’s almost hopeless recapitulation of
his daily woes.
Act One, Scene Four

Two weeks have passed and it is Friday, pay day, for Troy and
Bono. Together the two enter the yard with their pay, but Troy has
extra compensation, for he is now a rubbish truck driver. When the
drama began, Troy asked Mr Rand why the whites were drivers and
the blacks were the lifters. Mr Rand told him to take it up with
union; Troy did, and the union made Troy a first in Hill District
African-American history – the first black driver. Troy calls Rose to
the yard to share the good news, Lyons arrives shortly thereafter
to repay his father and invites him to hear him perform, and Gabe
enters bequeathing Rose a flower. Thus, Troy’s audience is assembled
once again. Along with the story of his recent success, Troy begins
narrating another story, but this is a painful one.
Troy relays the story of his youth as a sharecropper’s son. Proudly
he asserts that his father did not leave his family – eleven children –
but he admits that his father was bitter and mean. He applauds his
father’s sense of responsibility, and is proud that he learned this les-
son from him and carried it with him even after he was ‘banished’
from home. For the first time in the drama, Troy’s character becomes
sympathetic as he unfolds how, at the age of 14, he became a man.
His passage into manhood was a violent beating at his father’s
hands, after he attempted to hit his father. Troy says that after he
regained consciousness, he could not return home and for this rea-
son, in 1918, he set out for Mobile (Alabama) and then began his
journey Northward. Rose and Gabe are inside of the house, but
Bono and Lyons hear this tale. Troy continues his story (Rose has
now re-joined his audience) and tells the assemblage how he ended
up in Pittsburgh, the penitentiary, and finally with Rose.
This scene, probably the drama’s longest, continues after Bono
and Lyons exit the yard, and Cory enters, angrily, from football
practice. Troy, after learning that Cory has lied to him about quit-
ting the football team and returning to his job at the A&P, obstructs
Cory’s scholarship opportunity. Cory accuses Troy of jealousy and
fear that he will be better than he is. Troy tells Cory to ‘come here’
(153), but Rose intervenes, and Troy issues Cory a verbal warning
that he has just made his first strike. He challenged and criticized
his father – Troy Maxson, the boss – so he had better be careful.
Fences director, Lloyd Richards, explains that Fences is a play
about the lessons that Troy Maxson learns from his bitter, ‘share-
cropper father’: ‘violence . . . the value of work . . . and responsibility’
(Richards, 1985: Introduction). Act One, Scenes Three and Four,
illustrate this theme and set the stage for the forthcoming ‘battle
royal’ between Troy and Cory.
Act Two, Scene One

This act begins on a Saturday, 2 weeks have passed. Rose and Cory
are in the yard discussing Cory’s refusal to follow his father’s instruc-
tions that he quit the football team. Always the referee between
Troy and Cory, Rose offers to speak to Troy. Troy and Bono enter
the yard. They have just returned from paying Gabriel’s bail bond
after he had been arrested and charged with ‘disturbing the peace’
(155). The two immediately resume construction on the Maxsons’
fence. Bono uses this opportunity to discuss Troy’s relationship with
Alberta, his mistress. He explains to Troy that after he selected Rose
to be his wife, he knew that Troy was good model of manhood.
Hence, he decided that ‘[he] was gonna follow this nigger . . . he
might take me somewhere’ (158). He advises Troy to be careful
not to ruin his marriage, and reminds him that ‘Rose a good woman’
(158). Subtly, Bono also asks Troy to avoid shattering the heroic
image that he has of him. Bono exits and Rose enters the yard
so that she and Troy may continue their discussion about Gabriel.
Troy badly handles the segue from this discussion into an oppor-
tunity to tell her about his affair with Alberta and impending
fatherhood.
This scene, which began with Troy’s frustration with the law, now
explodes with Rose’s anger and resentment as she responds to Troy’s
declaration that he is not willing to give up Alberta. A major point
of conflict, this scene places Rose against Troy in a verbal war,
spoken in two languages: Rose’s language is about love and family;
Troy’s language is riddled with baseball metaphors. This scene con-
cludes with a second impending battle between Troy and Cory.
Troy grabs Rose’s arm and after hearing her cries, Cory exits from
the house, grabs his father from behind, and punches him in the
chest (‘Stage Directions’, in Wilson, 1985: 166). Troy rises to spar
with his son but Rose, again the referee, holds him back as he
informs Cory that he now has two strikes against him.
Act Two, Scene Two

This scene is set 6 months later, on the day that Alberta gives birth
to Raynell. Troy is on his way to visit Alberta when Rose stops him
to ask if he plans to come home from work on the next day, pay day
Friday. Troy responds that he always comes home and that he always
brings his pay to Rose, but he needs his space. Rose then accuses
Troy of signing a form that would allow Gabriel to be committed to
the mental hospital, a deal which would provide Troy with half of
Gabe’s monthly assistance check. Although Troy did sign the form,
he contradicts himself as he, first, denies this act then states that he
cannot read; therefore, he did not know what he signed. Rose dis-
misses his claim and accuses him of harming Gabe in the same way
that he has hurt Cory; he signed for one but refused to sign for the
other. In the midst of this battle, they are interrupted by the tele-
phone. Rose answers the call and returns to the yard to tell Troy that
the hospital phoned to say that Alberta has died, but the baby is
fine. After Rose re-enters the house, Troy’s anger rises and he informs
Death that he is going to build a fence around his home, and
commands Death to remain outside of the fence until he (Death) is
ready to do battle with him.
Act Two, Scene Three

This is Fences’s most succinct scene, but it is also one of the most
powerful scenes in all of Wilson’s dramas. If this scene had a title it
would be ‘Rose’s Stance’, for with few words and actions Rose dom-
inates this scene and places Troy in a position of powerlessness.
Three days after his daughter’s birth, Troy brings the infant to the
Maxson home and asks Rose to ‘help me care for her’ (173). Rose
responds, ‘you can’t visit the sins of the father upon the child . . .’
and her final pronouncement, ‘the child got a mother. But you
a womanless man’ (173), inverts Fences’s existing power structure.
Rose’s simultaneous adoption of Raynell and ‘divorce’ from Troy is
powerful illustration of her character’s strength, a strength that was
up to this point in the drama overshadowed by Troy. Rose wins

this battle, but Troy’s war continues.
Act Two, Scene Four

Two months have passed. Cory, now a high-school graduate, is
searching for a job, Rose is mothering the infant Raynell and Troy
spends his Friday evenings alone, for Bono has found a new Friday
night activity. This scene may be considered both Fences’s denoue-
ment and central rising action, because Troy and Cory have their
final standoff. In this scene, Rose, with Raynell in tow, leaves
home to drop off a cake at the church and Troy and Cory are left
alone. This time no referee will stop the fight.
Troy is sitting on the steps, drinking and singing his theme
song ‘Old Blue’ when Cory attempts to ‘walk over’ him (178) to get
into the house. Troy finds Cory’s act to be disrespectful, and the
two begin a verbal war that turns physical. This time Troy is the
victor. While the first battles between the two were primarily verbal,
this last battle involves a weapon – Troy’s bat – and results in ban-
ishment. Troy tells Cory it is time for him to leave the home, to
which Cory responds with a litany of Troy’s hypocrisies. Troy grows
angrier, and the battle turns physical. Troy shoves Cory. Cory takes
up the bat, then swings at his father but misses. Troy grabs the bat
and raises it to swing at his son. However, as the Stage Directions
state, ‘he stops himself ’ (181) and instead banishes Cory to the other
side of the fence. This scene concludes with Troy, alone, assuming a
batting stance and commanding Death to pitch him ball. He is
ready to do battle.
Act Two, Scene Five

Fences’s last scene is about closure and forgiveness. It is now 1965,
on the morning of Troy’s funeral. Cory, now a military man, enters
the yard and becomes reacquainted with his half-sister, Raynell.
He also becomes acquainted with the truth of his reality, for after
telling his mother that he does not plan to attend the funeral, he
learns from her that, try as he might, he is very much like the father
that ran him away. As she attempts to help Cory forgive Troy, Rose
admits that while Troy had his faults, she allowed his wants and
needs to consume her. Thus, she is just as much to blame for Troy’s
large sense of himself as he was. As the Maxson family and Bono
have gathered to lay Troy’s body to rest, they have also gathered
within the fenced yard to lay Troy’s sins to rest and forgive him. The
drama concludes as Gabriel enters the yard and, as he promised,
attempts to blow his horn to announce Troy’s arrival at heaven’s
gates. After no sound emerges from the horn, Gabriel then dances as
if possessed. This final action allows the presumed fool of the play to
have the final word.
Character analysis
Troy Maxson
Troy Maxson is Wilson’s penultimate ‘everyman’ character. James
Earl Jones, who played the role of Troy Maxson in the play’s Yale
production through its last performance on Broadway, says of the
character and Wilson’s language: ‘When I played Troy Maxson on
Broadway in 1987, the speeches simply guided themselves’ (2001:
84). It is these speeches that enable the audience to truly under-
stand the magnitude and universality embodied by the character.
Troy is a man who is weighed down with responsibilities, but is
determined to meet those responsibilities despite racism, economic
inequality and illiteracy. Troy came into his manhood at 14, and
by age 53, his age at the beginning of the play, he has survived and
prevailed in a world that restricts the definitions of black manhood.
He, in the jargon of his beloved baseball, ‘bunted and proved them
all wrong’ (164), for he is married, has two sons (the older from
his first marriage), a job and a home. Despite racism, Troy has
succeeded after walking into the North and its American dream
as best as an illiterate, African-American man can in the early part

of the twentieth century. His strength lies within his hands, words
and the desire to ‘do right,’ but Troy’s strength and ‘I ain’t sorry for
nothin’ I done’ (172) philosophy also present him as a selfish bully
who wishes to control all those things and persons around him.
Rose Maxson
Rose Maxson’s character states: ‘But that’s what life offered me in
the way of being a woman and I took it’ (190). This statement
encapsulates her persona. Rose is a woman who allowed a ‘big man’
like Troy Maxson to mentally and physically consume her in exchange
for protection against the external and internal challenges that
many black women faced in the first five decades of the twentieth
century. Rose loves Troy and strives to be the epitome of a good
wife, despite the cost. Because of her willingness to sacrifice herself
in order to be Troy’s wife, Rose is often considered a strong, but
underdeveloped representative feminist character. While I cannot
completely counter this reading of Rose, I would expand the analy-
sis to point out that Rose, especially after Troy admits to infidelity
and refuses to stop his adultery, lets him know exactly how she feels.
However, she does not leave Troy and, after the death of Troy’s
mistress, she raises his child as her own. Rose, the seeming antithesis
to black feminist ideology, demonstrates her strong feminist voice
when she tells Troy that from now on he is going to be a ‘womanless
man’ (173). She chooses motherhood over marriage, and remains
within the confines of the home that she has sacrificed herself to
create for Cory, Troy, herself and now Raynell. Rose loves herself,
but she loves her family also. Like many women in 1957, she made
choices or rather sacrifices that reflected the choices/choicelessness
that the world offered women, especially black women.
Gabriel Maxson
Gabriel Maxson is a Wilsonian spectacle character. Wilson explains

these characters as ‘mentally deficient’ (Shannon, 1991: 143) and
‘fully integrated into the other characters’ lives, but they are a
spectacle for the audience’ (Lyons, 1997: 213). Gabriel’s grand sense
of himself may be misinterpreted as comic or even psychotic; how-
ever, he is just as strong as the other characters in this work. Gabriel
is a war veteran, who has lost part of his brain for a country that still
views him as a second-class citizen. Despite his handicap, he wants
to be self-sufficient and respected as a man with his ‘own key’ (126).
Gabriel once resided with the Maxsons, but he now lives indepen-
dently in two rented rooms. An entrepreneur, Gabriel peddles
second-hand fruit and vegetables in the Hill District and is proud
of every quarter that he earns.
Gabriel’s presence in this drama is two-fold, for not only does
he serve as the spectacle character, but he also functions as the
embodiment of a Greek chorus, moving the play’s action along and
providing a reminder to both the characters and the audience that a
force exists that is greater than Troy Maxson.
Lyons Maxson
Lyons Maxson is probably the least developed of all of Fences’s
characters, but his flatness reflects his connection with, or rather
disconnection from, his father. Lyons is the oldest Maxson child.
He is a jazz musician, whose work ethic and musical taste contrast
greatly with his father’s. Troy Maxson is a blues man whose life has
been filled with the blues’ pains and pleasures. Lyons, in contrast,
appears to posses a carpe diem attitude in which he chooses to create
his own way and go against the established or accepted grain of
black masculinity. He refuses to be controlled by life’s strictures,
and lives according to his own rules. Although Lyons’s choices
appear to be irresponsible in comparison to his father’s choice, they
are not less significant. Instead, they illustrate that Lyons, who was
raised primarily by his mother, is very much his father’s son. Like
Troy, he has created his own world view, and he will follow this view
despite his father’s or society’s criticisms.
Cory Maxson
Cory Maxson is Troy Maxson’s second child. He is the son who lives
in Troy’s home and eats Troy’s food, and as his mother will remind
him on the day of Troy’s funeral, he is just like his father. Unlike his
half-brother, Lyons, Cory has been reared in a nuclear family. He is
a good student and athlete, and has a job at the local A&P. He is the
direct recipient of Troy’s fatherly instruction. Cory plays an integral
role in Fences not only because he is the other half of the drama’s
father–son conflict, but also because he is the innocent half who
is forced to accept his father’s definition of responsibility. Cory’s
challenge in Fences is to leap over the fence of Troy so that he may
find himself.
Raynell Maxson
Harry Elam, Jr offers a perfect reading of Raynell Maxson. He
identifies her as being a ray of hope for the Maxson family:
The seven-year-old Raynell, the product of Troy’s illicit affair,

enters in the final scene of Fences and produces powerful rever-
berations of change; she is the living manifestation of Troy’s past
infidelities and also the signifier of his eventual redemption. The
intrusion of this new character during the play’s denouement is a
deliberate breach of the accepted conventions of realistic play
construction. Wilson uses her appearance to convey the impor-
tance of legacy but also the potential for growth and progress.
Significantly, Raynell’s entrance not only occurs on the day of her
father’s funeral, but in the year 1965, in the midst of the Civil
Rights era, a period of intense struggle and new opportunity for
African Americans. Raynell’s emergence at this precise moment
brings a ‘ray’ of sunshine that hearkens a brighter tomorrow for
the Maxson family and for black America. (Elam, 2004: 75)
I would like to expand Elam’s reading of Raynell to show how

Raynell is also a ray of hope for black womanhood. Rose realizes
that she allowed Troy to consume her, and I suggest that Rose will
(if this play’s action were continued) raise Raynell to not only avoid
the sins of her father, but also the self-inflicted sin that Rose com-
mitted against herself by giving up so much of herself in order to
love someone else. I think it is significant that Raynell is a girl child,
for up until his fifties Troy only sired sons. While Lyons does not
share his work ethic or world view, and Cory is ‘more like him’ than
he knows, Raynell brings Troy’s transgressions full circle and, argu-
ably, through her birth makes Troy realize the unique power that
women possess, motherhood. He, unfortunately, does not live to
see Raynell grow into womanhood, but he dies knowing that
Raynell is being reared by Rose. Raynell has not only inherited
Troy’s blues song ‘Old Blue’, but has also been saved from a life
of orphanage and illegitimacy through Rose’s adoption of her. Rose
is both Raynell’s other mother and mama. She then, specifically,
becomes Rose’s ultimate ray of hope and second chance.
Jim Bono
Jim Bono is Troy Maxson’s oldest friend and confidante. His friend-
ship with Troy began, as with many of Wilson’s protagonists, during
their incarceration and lasts until he, along with Troy’s family, sees
Troy’s corpse into the ground. Bono openly admires Troy’s strength,
boldness and resiliency; yet Bono, as a true friend should, does not
shy away from his responsibility to point out Troy’s faults and
attempts to warn him to avoid those forces that could ruin the life
that he has struggled to create. As disappointed by Troy’s philander-
ing as Rose is, Bono avoids Troy after he admits his affair, but he
still cares for his friend. Bono is a true friend and, interestingly, he
gets to hear Troy tell him that he loves him, something that Troy
does not say to either of his sons during the course of the drama.
Troy’s words to Bono, ‘I love you, nigger’ (152), demonstrate the
bond that black men can forge despite society’s attempts to restrain,
dehumanize and emasculate them. Bono’s devotion to Troy and

their friendship illustrates Wilson’s particular perspective on African-
American men as brothers, together, who can change their world.
Influences
Wilson composed Fences’s first scene while riding on a bus, follow-
ing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’s success at the 1982 Eugene O’Neill
Playwright’s Conference (Herrington, 1998: 63). He wrote Fences
in order to avoid the ‘one play’ trap that many African-American
dramatists have succumbed to and to answer the critics’ question
(following the success of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) of whether he
could compose a ‘traditional play’ that focused primarily upon one
character. According to Herrington, ‘While his previous play, Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom, achieved great critical and box-office success,
it was faulted by many critics for its non-traditional structure and
its bifurcated focus. Wilson reacted to the criticism as a direct chal-
lenge and strove to write a play with a conventional narrative, one
large central character, and a more universal theme’ (Herrington,
1998: 64).
Fences’s critical and financial successes proved that Wilson, ever
the warrior, met and exceeded the challenge. Through a realistic
presentation of African-American lives, Wilson composed a drama
that has become both a great American work and a universal work
that is, as Herrington asserts, ‘prime material for the study of the
development of a playwright’s vision for a single play’ (Herrington,
1998: 77).
Fences illustrates Wilson’s ability to navigate away from the
ensemble style of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and into a structure that
would allow him to use a more traditional medium to relay the
blues-filled story of Troy Maxson and the persons around him.
However, while it may be argued that Fences’s strongest influence
was the traditional dramatic structure, the play was also influenced
by an interdisciplinary collage of elements that included the artwork
of Romare Bearden, the political and cultural rhetoric of Black

Arts Movement dramatist Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones) and
the African-American cultural soundtrack, the blues. Collectively,
these influences reflect August Wilson, the cultural nationalist, and
his allegiance to the beauty and survival of the African-American
culture.
Romare Bearden’s collage, Continuities, was the first component
upon which Wilson based Fences. This image, featuring a man hold-
ing a baby in his arms, influenced the key scene where Troy returns
to his yard holding baby Raynell and requests Rose’s assistance to
raise her. Wilson identifies Fences’s next influence in several inter-
views, but he offers a full discussion in his ‘The Ground on Which
I Stand’. In this address, Wilson acknowledges his indebtedness to
the artists of the 1960s Black Arts Movement:
Ron Milner, Ed Bullins, Philip Hayes Dean, Richard Wesley,

Lonne Elder III, Sonia Sanchez, Barbara Ann Teer and Amiri
Baraka were among those playwrights who were particularly
vocal and whose talent confirmed their presence in the society
and altered the American Theater, its meaning, its craft, and its
history. The brilliant explosion of black arts and letters of the
1960s remains, for me the hallmark and the signpost that points
the way to our contemporary work on the same ground . . .
(Wilson, 1997: 496)
Along with his contemporaries, Baraka provided Wilson with the

cultural–political tools through which to excavate the complexity of
Troy Maxson, the African-American Everyman. Wilson told David
Savran that he ‘liked’ the language of Baraka’s Four Revolutionary
Plays and that he attempted to imitate Baraka in his earlier plays,
but realized that he ‘wasn’t him and that wasn’t going to work’
(Sarvan, 1987: 23). He explained to Carl Rosen that Baraka’s work
influenced his through his ‘ideas of black power, black nationalism’
(1996: 199), and Herrington notes that in early drafts of Fences
Wilson had Troy express these types of communal convictions. As

Fences evolved into its latter and final drafts, Troy became more
selfish (Herrington, 1998: 74). This departure from Baraka illus-
trated Wilson’s desire to find his own voice while, simultaneously,
paying homage to the cultural–political ‘kiln in which [he] was
fired’ (Wilson, 1997: 494).
The Blues, an African-American vernacular form that originated
in Mississippi’s Delta region at the beginning of the twentieth
century, provided Wilson with the soundtrack through which to
interpret and convey the meanings behind the African-American
lives that he presented on stage. African-American blues musicians
and singers originated and used the blues form to reflect the com-
plexity and tragedy of disenfranchised, impoverished and segregated
African-American life and to celebrate the ability of themselves
and their people to survive despite and in the midst of life’s chal-
lenges. After listening to his first blues recording, Wilson told Bill
Moyers that this music altered his perspective. He began to truly
understand the meaning of those stories that he would hear from
the men who frequented the pool halls and restaurants where he
worked during his twenties. Moreover, he began to recognize the
significance of those unacknowledged African-American heroes and
sheroes who were the backbone of the African-American culture.
Wilson stated:
I began to see a value in the lives that I simply hadn’t seen before.
I discovered a beauty and nobility in their struggle to survive. I
began to understand the fact that the avenues for participation
in society were closed to these people and that their ambitions
had been thwarted, whatever they may have been. The mere fact
that they were still able to make this music was a testament to
the resiliency of their spirit. (Moyers, 1988: 64)
Thus, ‘Old Blue’ becomes both Troy’s survival testimony and

eulogy as the audience hears him sing it during the course of the
play, and then listen as his children – Cory and Raynell –

perform it as a duet on the day of his funeral. The blues enabled
Troy, specifically, and African Americans collectively, in the words
of novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison, to ‘keep the painful details
and episodes of a brutal existence alive in one’s aching conscious-
ness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolation
of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism’ (Ellison, 1964: 78) and to sing their songs for themselves.
Lastly and most importantly, Fences is greatly influenced by
realism. In a 1999 interview with George Plimpton and Bonnie
Lyons, Wilson expanded his list of dramatic influences to specifi-
cally include African-American novelists/playwrights/essayists Ed
Bullins and James Baldwin. While Wilson had already referenced
both men in other interviews, in this interview he states that in
Bullins’s work he ‘first discovered someone writing plays about
blacks with uncompromising honesty’ (Plimpton and Lyons, 1999:
8). This same honesty not only greatly influenced Wilson’s canon,
but specifically Fences, in that Wilson realistically created a flawed
hero and his family, a group of individuals that reflected every
nuance of human existence honestly and realistically.
Close reading of key scenes

Fences is probably the most often anthologized of all of Wilson’s
dramas. One of the reasons for its popularity is its universally acces-
sible themes of which the father–son conflict is central. When
reading Fences, students are drawn deeply into the drama from its
first act to its last, particularly as they begin to discover the man that
is Troy Maxson.
Act One: ‘I’m the boss around here’

If Fences’s first act bore a title, it would be culled from Troy’s words,
‘I’m the boss around here’ (135). In this first act, Troy evolves from
being a lovable ‘big man’, who knows that he has rights and is
willing to ask for them, into a human fence that not only seeks to
construct the boundaries which his sons should traverse, but also a
fence that no one or thing should attempt to cross. Troy, in essence,
morphs into an extremely complex and brutally realistic man who
may be difficult to love. Act One includes numerous moments
that are imperative to understanding Fences, but there are several
that reflect Wilson’s dual tasks – to present the African-American
culture honestly and to demonstrate the universality of the human
experience.
As has been noted, one of Fences’s main themes is father–son
conflict. Troy’s conflict is not with one, but with both his sons. The
first conflict that arises is between Troy and Lyons. When Troy
crosses a line and criticizes the way that Lyons has been raised by
stating, ‘Boy, your mama did a hell of job raising you’ (120), Lyons
quickly reminds Troy that he does not know how he was raised
because he was not around (Troy was incarcerated) during his
youth (120). This initial stand off is one that Troy, who is the
boss, has to back down from because Lyons is correct. Troy cannot
re-raise a 34-year-old man; he has missed this opportunity. Hence,
he must accept Lyons for who he has become.
This act also presents probably the most memorable illustration
of the father–son conflict when, in scene three, Cory asks Troy why
is it that he ‘ain’t never liked’ him? Innocently, Cory’s question not
only bears the weight of a child seeking approval from his parent,
but also Cory’s attempt to understand his father’s actions. However,
it is Troy’s unsympathetic response that begins to mar his image in
both the audience’s eyes and Cory’s. Instead of responding with a
reassuring ‘I like you,’ Troy asks Cory, ‘Who the hell say I got to like
you?’ (136), and explains to him that he and Rose are his responsi-
bility and it is both his ‘job’ and ‘responsibility’ to provide for them,
but liking him is not required (137). Troy is the atypical loving
father in this scene, but the final words of this scene unveil the
fatherly advice and survival message that he attempts to relay to

Cory. This sage advice is what Troy learned from his father and on
his own but because of the harshness of the lessons he had to learn, he
does not possess a language through which to express this to his son.
It is not until the end of Act One that we discover the lesson
that Troy learned from his father. In this scene, Troy becomes a
sympathetic character who unfurls a past that is both brutal and
shocking. Through language, Wilson allows Troy to transport his
audience – Bono, Rose and Lyons – back into a time when Troy
was someone’s innocent and vulnerable son. Troy relays the events
of his battle with his father, a battle that served as his rites of passage
ceremony from adolescence into manhood. In the course of this
ceremony, Troy physically challenged his father, lost the fight and
realized that, as he states, ‘the time had come for me to leave my
daddy’s house’ (149).
Act One, Scene Four concludes with Troy serving as both umpire
and coach as he warns Cory that his rite of passage ceremony has
began. Using baseball jargon, his second language, Troy taunts Cory
by saying, ‘You swung and you missed. That’s strike one. Don’t you
strike out!’ (153). For many readers and audience members, espe-
cially males, this scene is eerily reflective of their own battles with
the fathers.
Act Two: The final showdown(s)

Fences’s second act holds the final showdowns foreshadowed in Act
One. Just as a baseball player up to bat has three opportunities to
make contact with the leather-covered baseball before striking out,
and thus losing his opportunity to land on a base, Troy is served
three balls and strikes out once, twice and then a third time which,
symbolically, represents his death. Troy’s first swing and miss is one
of the most important scenes in the entire play – his battle with
Rose. Students, especially female students, find this to be one of the
drama’s most compelling, for it offers proof of Troy’s selfishness and
Rose’s strength. In Act One, Troy’s cruel, but didactic, response to

his son has already vilified him, but his announcement to his wife
(of 18 years) that he has been having an affair, and that he and his
lover are expecting a child, completes his vilification. In this scene
Troy’s selfishness surfaces, especially as he struggles to find the words
to justify his infidelity. Rose is going through her daily ritual of
taking care of her family members and preparing their dinner when
Troy states, ‘I’m trying to find a way to tell you . . . I’m gonna be
a daddy’ (161). Following this statement, Troy and Rose begin a
sorrowful dramatic exchange in which she expresses her anger and
disappointment, and he continues to defend his affair. Rose explains
to Troy that she ‘done tried to be everything a wife should be’ for
him, and that she hoped that their family would differ from her
birth family, filled with half-brothers and sisters (162). Pleadingly
she asks him the question ‘why?’, which is interestingly similar to
Cory’s question in the previous act, but, again, Troy fails to provide
a redeeming response. Instead, he further buries himself within
a moat of selfishness when he states that Alberta frees him from his
familial responsibilities and enables him to be a ‘different man’
where he doesn’t have to worry about bills or home repairs, but he
can ‘just be a part of [himself ] that [he] ain’t never been’ (163).
Moreover, when Rose asks Troy whether he plans to continue his
relationship with Alberta, he does not hesitate to privilege his wants
above his marital vows and declares that he cannot give up the
euphoria that Alberta gives him.
This scene is also important because Troy resorts to baseball jar-
gon to explain his affair. He becomes the announcer for a verbal
baseball game in which he is the star player. Play by play, he
announces how he has been able to make it from one base to the
other without being tagged out. Rose and Cory were the first base,
and Alberta ‘firmed up his backbone’ (164) and made him think
that he could steal to second base. When Rose reminds him that
their marriage is not a baseball game, Troy again struggles to explain
himself and admits that he is in a state of ennui, and tired of staying

on the same base of familial responsibility. During this exchange,
Troy and Rose are supposed to be talking to each other, but Rose
appears to be the only participant who is listening. While they both
express important perspectives, Rose’s voice usurps this scene espe-
cially as she explains to him how she has sacrificed her needs and
wants to be his wife and helpmate and ‘buried them inside’ of him
and their union (165).
In Act Two, Scene Three, which takes place 6 months after Troy’s
confession, he and Rose engage in a second battle that further estab-
lishes Rose as the nobler of the two. This scene also finds Troy
attempting his second swing at the ball. In the previous scene,
Troy learns that Alberta has died while giving birth to their daughter,
Raynell. Troy confronts Death and challenges him to stay on the
other side of the fence (that he wants to construct) so that he may
protect those things and persons who belong to him until he is ready
to face Death (170). Scene Three is set 3 days later. Troy returns to his
yard carrying his motherless child and has to ask Rose for assistance:
ROSE. Okay, Troy . . . you’re right. I’ll take care of your baby for
you . . . cause . . . like you say . . . she’s innocent . . . and you can’t
visit the sins of the father upon the child. A motherless child has
a hard time.
(She takes the Baby from him.)
From right now . . . this child got a mother. But you a woman-
less man.
(Rose turns and exits into the house with the Baby. Lights go down
to black.) (173)
Rose agrees to help Troy raise his child, but she dictates the terms of
their relationship. Rose is in control, and Troy has struck out again.
He has lost his wife and his mistress.
I have quoted Rose’s speech in its entirety (and its accompanying

stage directions) because it is one of the most powerful scenes in
the play. This scene depicts an African-American male–female rela-
tionship that is, simultaneously, riddled with love and strife, and
demonstrates Rose’s strength and belief in the family unit, despite
the ‘sins of the father’ and the head of the Maxson household.
Moreover, this scene exemplifies the symbiotic relationship between
Wilson’s primary characters and the seemingly peripheral charac-
ters, the women. Thus, this scene is a battle won for black women,
the black family unit, and Wilson, in that it presents a family that
refuses to die and dissolve despite internal and external forces.
Troy makes his third strike in Act Two, Scene Four. Two months
have passed, and a drunken, blues-singing Troy is sitting on the
steps of the Maxson home. Cory attempts to climb the steps so that
he may enter the house and tells his father, ‘You in my way. I got to
get by’ (178). Cory’s words mean much more than Troy is a physical
obstruction. Troy is also a psychological barrier that has prevented
Cory from growing into his own sense of manhood. Initially the
action between Troy and Cory is primarily verbal, but Troy throws
the first punch and shoves his son after Cory tells that he is just ‘an
old man’ and he cannot be ‘whup[ped]’ by him anymore (180).
This scene intensifies when Cory picks up Troy’s bat and wields it
as weapon of self-defence against his father. What ensues is a fierce
battle of wills and repression as Cory and Troy, according to the stage
directions ‘struggle for the bat’ and then Troy, the father, the stronger
of the two men, takes the bat, prepares to swing at his son, but
instead of hitting his son, banishes Cory from ‘around [his] house’
(181). Finally, Cory is free, but the Maxson men’s history repeats
itself. Like his father, Cory has fought his father, lost, and has been
made homeless by the father. It appears that Troy has won this
battle, but Troy has struck out again. He has now lost Rose, Alberta
and Cory.
Fences concludes in Act Two, Scene Five. This brief scene features
two key moments that pay homage to the now deceased Troy. It is
8 years later, 1965, the American Civil Rights Movement has gar-
nered victories against racialized school segregation in the South,
Martin Luther King, Jr is the leader of a non-violent campaign to
rid American of its racist practices, and Motown and Stax Records
are providing rhythm and blues infused soundtracks for a slowly
desegregating America. The blues has been incorporated into rhythm
and blues, and Troy’s body is on its way to the burial ground. How-
ever, Troy’s blues song lives on.
Cory returns to the family home on the day of his father’s funeral
and becomes reacquainted with Raynell. Although the two barely
know one another, they are linked by more than their father’s blood
and name; they also share his song. In what is Fences’s most senti-
mental scene, Cory and Raynell perform the song ‘Old Blue’ as a
duet, an action that proves that, despite Troy’s actions, he attempted
to be the best father that he could, and bequeathed his children an
oral memory that they can share.
Act Two’s final action centers upon Gabriel as he attempts to
blow his horn as a signal to St Peter to open the gates for Troy’s
spirit. When the trumpet does not emit a sound, Gabriel does not
give up. He begins what is described in the stage directions as ‘a
dance of atavistic signature and ritual ’ and upon its conclusion
remarks, ‘That’s the way that go!’ (192). Gabriel refuses to allow
anything to prevent him from announcing his brother’s entry into
heaven. Hence, the menacing Troy has been forgiven, and will find
a home in the spiritual realm.
From beginning to end, Fences is a drama filled with scenes and
speeches that mesmerize and encourage audiences to re-examine
themselves and their families. Fences is a drama that summons all
to recognize African-American men, their culture, and note the
humanity and reality of their lives.
Changing views of the play

Fences has been an American dramatic masterpiece for almost a
quarter of a century. From its first production at Yale to its most
recent productions, it has earned and continues to earn primarily
favorable reviews and lends itself to illuminating scholarly discus-
sions. Fences’s initial critiques were made by newspaper and magazine
theatre critics. Shortly after the success of this great work and its
predecessor, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, August Wilson and Fences
became recognized entities within academic circles. Thus, Wilson’s
back-to-back successes generated the first bio-critical discussion
of Fences and his subsequent works, several collections of essays on
the evolving Wilsonian dramatic canon, and, in this century, a pub-
lished collection of interviews and a growing body of revisionist
scholarship that is the result of Wilson’s completed ten-play cycle.
What follows are selected illustrations of the various journalistic
and academic perspectives on Fences.
Fences received positive theatrical and scholarly reviews since its
debut at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985. Following on the heels
of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’s success, Fences, as was to be expected,
was often reviewed comparatively with this work, with most critics
finding it to be a wonderful second work from a new Broadway
name. Frank Rich, theatre critic for The New York Times, offered a
balanced review of Fences’s Yale production in which he compared
the drama to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and identified areas where
the play failed, equaled, and exceeded its predecessor. Rich asserted
that Wilson’s play captures and presents the brewing racial strife of
the 1960s. His achievement in the play is ‘that he ma[de] us under-
stand the father’s behavior without ever sentimentalizing him,’ and
Rich praised Wilson’s language and ‘potent passages’ (Rich, 1985)
However, he also noted that Fences failed to properly acknowledge
the strengths of the other characters, because Wilson ‘worked so hard’
to present a Troy whom audiences who could praise and despise.

Rich suggested that:
The reason for this shortfall in ‘Fences’ may be that Mr Wilson

has now learned more – may too much – about playwriting.
‘Fences’ is technically better crafted than the previous work . . .
But the dialogue doesn’t always open up its speakers’ hearts
as the monologues in ‘Ma Rainey’ did . . . Similarly, the often
splintery scenes seem designed to convey melodramatic story
twists . . . rather than to chart the characters. (Rich, 1985; www.
nytimes.com)
Two years later, after Fences had been substantially revised follow-
ing productions at Yale and two regional theatres, Fences’s production
on Broadway compelled Brent Staples of The New York Times to
laud Wilson’s ability to reach several audiences with one play – men,
women and a universal audience – and force him away from his
‘comfortable . . . critical distance’ and find himself ‘among those
for whom [Fences] is more than play’ but also an opportunity to
relive the experience of their own families, particularly their fathers.
It is important to note that Staples recognized Fences’s universality.
He writes, ‘Mr Wilson . . . has turned an interesting trick – he has
found the universal in the particular without compromising the
latter’ (Staples, 1987). Moreover, Staples makes a compelling obser-
vation about Fences’s effect on a black middle-class audience that
reflects Wilson’s 1960s Black Arts Movement influence and his
identification of himself as both a black and cultural nationalist:
Mr Wilson risks disapproval here – from black middle-class

theatergoers who might resent what they perceive to be cultural
dirty laundry washed in public, from white theatergoers who
might feel on the outside of the proceedings . . . In effect, the
playwright has proceeded as if he don’t give no nevermind about

what middle-class folk think. So much the better here; because
this play with virtually no concessions to the middle class has
enfolded the universal in the particular, in a way that results in
total accessibility – even if the audience response may not be
typical for Broadway. (Staples, 1987)
Staples concludes his review of Fences with a poignant portrait of

catharsis when he writes, ‘and this son, third row center, seeing his
father – work suit, rage, size and all – could only nod his head and
think, “That’s exactly how it was.” He removed his glasses to reduce
those two outlines colored in tears, and occasionally had to cover
his eyes’ (Staples, 1987). Hence, for Staples, an African-American
theatre critic, Wilson accomplished his goal – to compose a drama
that would prove that he could compose a ‘traditional’ drama,
and that the African-American experience did and does reflect
the entire human condition.
A third New York Times theatre critic called Fences ‘the most power-
ful new American play of 1987’ and applauded its ability to attract
theatregoers who desired more than Broadway musicals and ‘special
effects’ (‘Stage View’, 27 December 1987). This same critic credited
Wilson with composing a drama that ‘demand[s] that we think
about who has what in American life’ (‘Stage View’, 27 December
1987). Time magazine critic William A. Henry shared Rich’s and
Staple’s favorable views of the play, and added that ‘in craftsmanship,
poignancy, and lingering impact, Fences represents a major step for-
ward for Wilson’ as a dramatist (Henry, 1987: 81). Sports Illustrated
critic Robert W. Creamer’s laudatory critique of Fences not only pre-
dicted that Fences was ‘likely to become a classic staple of American
drama’ (Creamer, 1987: 13), but also noted the ‘timelessness’ of
Troy’s arguments about ageism and racism in the American baseball
league(s) and the segregated duties of black and white garbage
workers as the play, ironically, debuted shortly before American

baseball found itself involved in another discussion of discrimina-
tion and desegregation.
While the majority of Fences’s reviews were favorable, several
critics found the drama to fall short. The Nation’s Thomas Disch
contended that Fences was ‘less inspired than Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom’ and that the play’s flaw was its focus on Troy Maxson who
is the only person ‘allowed to breathe’ or rather really speak. Disch
applauded James Earl Jones’s performance, but found Wilson’s
words to be tantamount to ‘spending an evening with a garrulous
drunk’ (Disch, 1987: 518).
In scholarly circles, Wilson’s Fences has garnered and continues
to evoke favorable acclaim and opportunities for study. Numerous
scholars have penned books, chapters, essays and conference pre-
sentations that have interpreted Fences as not only Wilson’s most
conventional drama, but also the work that became the hallmark of
his early commercial successes. Academically, Fences has been inter-
preted and discussed from historical, sociological, performative,
black masculinist, feminist, black feminist and cultural perspec-
tives, with most critics unanimously celebrating Wilson’s brilliance.
Fences’s academic criticism has not changed drastically since its earli-
est discussions, but it has evolved with new Wilsonian scholars
offering: (1) close revisions of the drama as part of Wilson’s com-
pleted 10-play cycle; (2) more universal readings of the drama
alongside the works of dramatists other than Eugene O’Neill, Arthur
Miller and Tennessee Williams; and (3) more interdisciplinary read-
ings of Fences. Thus, as any classic artistic work should, Fences will
continue to generate new discussions in the decades to come.
Sandra Shannon composed one of the earliest scholarly discus-
sions of Wilson’s Fences in her book-length discussion of his early
works, The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson (1995). In ‘Developing
Character: Fences, Shannon traces the play’s conception and evol-
ution from being a ‘challenge’ work to becoming Wilson’s most
lauded work. Within this discussion, Shannon discusses Wilson’s

maturation as a playwright and the evidence of this maturity in the
complexity of the drama’s anti-hero, Troy, and the cast of characters
whose actions he – directly and indirectly – controls. Shannon con-
textualizes the drama not only within its specified post-World War II
setting of 1957 and the decade of the 1950s, but she also biographi-
cally contextualizes Fences’s central battle, what she terms the ‘battle
royal’, between Troy Maxson and his son, Cory (and the first battle
royal between Troy and the senior Mr Maxson, the sharecropper).
Shannon asserts that this dramatic battle is reminiscent of Wilson’s
own battles with his stepfather, David Bedford, and his biological
father and namesake, Frederick Kittel.
Shannon critically assesses the drama’s other characters, but returns
her focus to critically dissect Troy’s character, his beliefs, sense of
responsibility, grandeur and affinity for language. It is in the discus-
sion of Troy’s linguistic prowess that Shannon, once again, melds
Troy and Wilson, for Wilson’s abilities with language help to create
Fences and the other nine works that comprise his dramatic canon
as more than mere dramas, but works that hearken back and cele-
brate the complex beauty of the African-American oral tradition
(Shannon, 1995: 104). Shannon discusses Fences comparatively
with works composed by other African-American dramatists and
Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and
Jitney.
In ‘Fences: The Sins of the Father . . .’, Kim Pereira offers a com-
pelling reading of the play’s beginning and ending settings, 1957
and 1965, as he compares Troy to Ma Rainey’s protagonist, Levee,
and discusses the changing times. Pereira also offers an insightful
discussion of Fences’s separation theme, especially as it has effected
and motivated the actions of the Maxson brothers – Troy and
Gabriel (Pereira, 1995: 39).
Joan Herrington’s I Ain’t Sorry for Nothin’ I Done: August Wilson’s
Process of Playwrighting (1998) offers a vital explanation of Wilson’s
early works – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Jitney and Joe Turner’s Come
and Gone – and a behind-the-scenes discussion of Fences from its
beginnings at the O’Neill Center on through its Broadway debut.
Herrington explains Wilson’s playwriting process and shows the
development of Fences through various drafts and its workshopped
experiences. Specifically, Herrington asserts that, ‘Because of its
conventional structure and the streamlined nature of its character
development, Fences is prime material for the study of the develop-
ment of a playwright’s vision for a single play’ (Herrington, 1998: 77),
and traces the evolution of Troy’s character from being a ‘Baraka-
influenced’ black nationalist ‘to a more individualistic and more
universal character’ (Herrington, 1998: 74). Herrington’s process
reading of Fences dissects both the structure of the play and Wilson’s
dramatic perspective. Thus, her work technically grounds early
readings of Wilson’s Fences (and other works) and enables Wilson’s
scholar to further situate Wilson and Troy as dramatic engineers
who, simultaneously, represent and construct a cultural icon.
Alan Nadel discusses Fences alongside Wilson’s third commercial
drama, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Nadel offers a reading of Fences’s
titular fence as both a literal, inanimate object, and a metaphoric
representation of American legal and racial boundaries. Nadel argues
that Fences and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone best illustrate Wilson’s
intention through his dramas and characters such as Troy to privi-
lege their own meanings of humanity as they challenge the largely
accepted American norms about race and privilege. In sum, Troy
constructs his own meanings and encloses/protects them within his
own person, and finally, within the space of his family’s property.
Michael Awkward’s contribution to Fences’s scholarly canon
interpreted the play (and its planned film adaptation) from an
multi-theoretical perspective that included film, racial and cultural
theories espoused by Omi, Winant, Clifford and Houston Baker,
Jr. Awkward asserts that the play’s
artistic ancestry . . . is at least as much Euro-American as African,

for the play’s blues sensibilities (themselves an American inven-
tion) are figured in a text which displays its creator’s obvious
mastery of conventional Euro-American theatrical structure,
pace, and methodology. Furthermore, its narrative events, par-
ticularly its exploration of family dynamics, appear – at least to
me – intended self-consciously to recall, in particular, Arthur
Miller’s classic mid-twentieth century American drama, Death of
a Salesman. (Awkward, 1994: 214)
As will be discussed in Chapter 3, Awkward’s contentions expose

a contradiction in Fences (the play) and in Wilson’s demand that a
black director be hired to direct the planned film adaptation.
Moreover, Awkward joins the list of Wilson’s critics who note the
contradictions between Wilson the commercially successful play-
wright and Wilson the artist-activist, especially after his 1996 ‘The
Ground on Which I Stand’ address.
Craig Werner contributed to Wilsonian scholarship through
highlighting jazz’s influence and presence within Wilson’s emerging
canon. Largely the African-American oral forms presented in Fences
are storytelling, blues, and lightly by way of Lyons, jazz. Werner’s
reading of Fences furthers the blues reading to include Wilson’s
blues woman – Rose – alongside the drama’s blues men, and also
reconfigures Gabriel, the spectacle character, as the embodiment
of jazz in Fences. Werner writes that Gabriel ‘combines the blues
and gospel dimensions of the jazz impulse’ (Werner, 1994: 41)
especially as he attempts to announce Troy’s presence at heaven’s
gates by first blowing into a mouthpiece-less horn, but then break-
ing into a dance and finally a howl. Gabriel – the person and his
actions – become a human site of ‘fragmentation’ and, according to
Werner, ‘Wilson bears witness to Gabriel’s jazz vision, his burden
and his call’ (Werner, 1994: 42).
More recently, Harry J. Elam, Jr ushered in new discussions of

not only Fences and its characters, but also Wilson’s evolving dra-
matic cycle with the publication of The Past as Present in the Drama
of August Wilson. In this text, Elam examines Wilson’s manipulation
of time within his dramatic cycle and argues that ‘Wilson’s history
cycle reveals an African-American continuum that is always in pro-
cess, stretching back into Africa and reaching into the future’ (Elam,
2004: xix). Elam offers compelling discussions of Rose Maxson as
both a mother and wife, Gabriel Maxson along with his kin (Wilson’s
other spectacle characters), and Troy and Wilson’s other male char-
acters illustrating Wilson’s aim to ‘represent black masculinity so
that it becomes a site of self-determination, pride, self-respect, and
historical consciousness’ (Elam, 2004: 128).
In Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American
Drama, Carla McDonough turns the focus specifically to Troy
Maxson and argues that Fences is ‘ultimately the story of manhood
as measured against that illusory American dream of material gain,
only this time the struggles of the male protagonist are further height-
ened by questions of racism’ (McDonough, 1997: 147). McDonough
compares Fences and Troy Maxson to their white American counter-
parts, Death of a Salesman and Willy Loman, and suggests that
like Loman for whites, Troy’s character becomes representative of
the ‘black experience in America’. Moreover, McDonough makes a
strong argument when she asserts that much of Troy’s ‘power’ is, like
that of Hansberry’s Walter Lee Younger, enabled because of the black
women (in Fences Rose and Alberta), who support them (McDonough,
1997: 149).
McDonough’s discussion of Fences and Troy is especially impor-
tant because she discusses Fences alongside Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come
and Gone and The Piano Lesson, but within a text that comparatively
examines images of masculinity dramatized in the works of drama-
tists Sam Shepard, David Mamet and David Rabe. She contends that
these works have oftentimes overlooked the connection between
‘race and issues of masscult’ (McDonough, 1997: 136). Wilson’s

works, however, provide ‘excellent texts for reading how race as well
as gender factor into male conflicts with and struggles for norma-
tive masculinity’ (McDonough, 1997: 137).
Peter Wolfe’s discussion of Fences, ‘The House of Maxson’, offers a
celebratory but critical reading of Fences’s protagonist, Troy Maxson,
and applauds Wilson’s ability to create such a complex and tragically
flawed character with whom audiences could and did empathize.
Wolfe’s discussion of Fences also identities the drama’s embedded
coding of and connection to Troy’s beloved sport, baseball. While
Wilson, the play, and many scholars and critics address Troy’s par-
ticipation in the Negro Baseball League and his frustration because
he was too old to pursue baseball as his career, Wolfe is one of a
few to note how Wilson further strengthens Troy’s connection to
baseball as he identifies the numerous ‘coincidental’ intersections
between baseball history and statistics, the play’s production his-
tory, and its characters (Wolfe, 1999: 56–57).
Twenty-first century scholarship on the drama began with Anna
Blumenthal offering a new reading of Fences in that she re-focuses
attention on Fences’s orality through Troy’s storytelling. Blumenthal
asserts that while early scholarship on Fences acknowledges Troy’s
gift of storytelling as a component of the African-American oral
tradition and as Wilson’s illustration of the African-American
culture, few scholars have studied the use and performative charac-
teristics of Troy’s story. Blumenthal’s scholarship suggests that Troy’s
character is not only the nucleus of Fences because Wilson has
intentionally created a character-driven play, but also because
Troy’s character is able to create and control an audience that will
aurally witness his verbal performances and, hopefully, learn from
them. Hence, Troy Maxson becomes an African-American griot who
‘enacts paternal and familial duty by teaching it in his narrative’
(Blumenthal, 2000: 80).
3 Production History
This chapter offers a brief history of American theatre productions

of Fences. It also discusses Margaret Booker’s production of Fences
in Beijing, China in 2000, the 2006 production of Fences at the
Pasadena Playhouse (Pasadena, California), the controversial and
yet-to-be-filmed filmic adaptation of the play, and the Kennedy
Center’s spring 2008 staged reading production.
Following in the footsteps of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wilson
submitted Fences to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s 1983
National Playwright’s Conference. The play was accepted and pre-
sented as a staged reading at this conference. Herrington details
how Wilson, Fences and Wilson’s latter plays benefited from his
repeat performances at the O’Neill Conference (1982, Ma Rainey’s
Black Bottom; 1983, Fences; 1984, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; 1986,
The Piano Lesson, 1991 Wilson’s dramaturge year; and 1994, Seven
Guitars), and outlines how Fences evolved from Wilson’s original text
to its Broadway version. Following the O’Neill’s Pre-Conference
(the first time the selected playwrights meet and read their plays
aloud and are assigned a director and dramaturge), Wilson altered
the structure of Fences from being relayed in flashback to a chrono-
logical plot. Wilson then revised the drama again during the summer
portion of conference in which the plays are presented as staged
readings to two different audiences (the conference participants
and staff, and the public). Herrington states that between the two
readings, Wilson cut ‘forty-five minutes from the play’ (1998: 53).
Production History 51
Lloyd Richards, again, took the directorial helm of an August

Wilson work and Fences moved from the O’Neill Playwright’s
Conference to the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.
The play opened there on April 30, 1985. The original cast included
James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson, Mary Alice in the role of Rose
Maxson, Courtney B. Vance played the role of Cory Maxson, Raynell
Maxson was played by Cristal Coleman and LaJara Henderson,
Charles Brown portrayed Lyons, Russell Costen starred in the role
of Gabriel Maxson and Ray Aranha performed the role of Jim Bono.
Before its Broadway debut, Fences took what Jeremy Gerard called
‘A Productive Detour’ (Gerard, 1987) and continued to follow the
path Wilson’s works from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom on through the
final work, Radio Golf, would journey (through a succession of
regional theatres and then Broadway). This Yale-Regional theatre-
Broadway trajectory enabled Wilson to utilize a unique production
and revision process for his plays which proved beneficial as he
continued to compose his twentieth-century cycle of plays.
Regional productions
Fences migrated from the Eugene O’Neill Center’s Playwright’s
conference to Yale’s stage, and then to the Goodman Theatre in
Chicago, Illinois, in January 1986. The Goodman’s production of
Fences offered Wilson a new space from which to revise the play and
correct some of its early flaws. For example, Wilson told Gerard
that the Goodman staging was ‘very helpful . . . especially with the
same cast and production team. At Yale, there were long blackouts
between the scenes because James Earl Jones would have to have a
costume change between the end of one scene and the beginning of
the next. We eliminated them by writing bridges between the scenes
(Gerard, 1987). Moreover, Fences forged a collaboration between
Wilson and the Goodman Theatre that proved beneficial for both
participants. Wilson found the first of several regional spaces in

which to perfect his work, the Goodman Theatre is one of the
few theatres that has produced all 10 of August Wilson’s plays, and
because of its partnership with Wilson, the theatre has diversified
its audience and ‘since Fences . . . presented more than 20 [twenty]
plays by other African-American writers’ (Goodman Theatre’s
website, 2007 at www.goodmantheatre.org). Thus, Fences began a
collaborative process that Wilson’s latter works also followed: pre-
Broadway stagings at regional theatres that allowed him to test out
early versions of the plays.
At the close of the Goodman’s production of Fences, the produc-
tion rights were purchased by Carole Shorenstein Hays and Fences
had its first commercial staging in San Francisco, California, but not
before a Seattle, Washington production at the Seattle Repertory
Theatre (1985–1986 season) featuring a different cast. Wilson also
forged a bond with the Seattle Repertory Theatre, and like the
Goodman Theatre, it has produced all of Wilson’s plays. The most
recent production was the 2007 production of Gem of the Ocean,
directed by stage, screen, television, and Wilsonian actor, Phylicia
Rashad.
Fences on Broadway
Finally, 4 years following its initial staged reading Fences debuted
on March 26, 1987, on Broadway, at the 46th Street Theatre. The
production was directed by Lloyd Richard and featured most of
the original cast members, with the exception of Gabriel played by
Frankie R. Faison and Karima Miller in the role of Raynell. Fences
ran at the 46th Street Theatre for 525 performances from March 26,
1987 to June 26, 1988, garnering Tony Awards for Best Play, Best
Direction of a Play (Lloyd Richards), Best Actor in a Play (James Earl
Jones), Best Featured Actress in a Play (Mary Alice); the Pulitzer
Prize for Drama, Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding New Play,
Outstanding Actor in a Play (James Earl Jones), and Outstanding

Featured Actress in a Play (Mary Alice). The play grossed 11 million
dollars.
Recent productions
Since Wilson’s death in 2005, numerous productions of his plays
have taken place throughout the country. In American regional
and university theatres, Wilson’s words have inspired and moved
audiences. From the Yellow Brick Studio in Honolulu, Hawaii to
Jackson State University’s (located in Jackson, Mississippi) Septem-
ber 2007 production, to Princeton University (Princeton, New
Jersey) and Delaware State University (Dover, Delaware), audiences
have responded to Fences and Wilson’s other moving dramas of
African-American life.
One of the most highly anticipated productions of the play
debuted in September 2006, when Wilsonian alumni Angela Bassett
and Laurence Fishburne headlined in the Pasadena Playhouse’s
revival of Fences. Directed by Sheldon Epps, this powerful version
continued the national productions of Wilson’s works, and afforded
Bassett and Fishburne the opportunity to work together on a play.
Bassett acted in role of Martha Pentacost in Wilson’s Joe Turner’s
Come and Gone at both the Yale Repertory Theatre (1986 and 1987)
and at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre, and Fishburne acted
the role of Sterling Johnson in Two Trains Running (for which he
won a Tony Award). Basset told Gia Gittleson, ‘When [the film]
Akeelah and the Bee opened, Laurence and I talked about Fences.
Then Sheldon Epps, the artistic director at the Pasadena Play-
house, asked me, ‘We’ve got the rights to Fences. Do you have any
interest?’ I thought, ‘My gosh, you heard our private conversation!’
(Gittleson, 2006: 230). Hence, Fences was re-born.
Garnering favorable reviews, this production featured Bassett
in the role of Rose, Fishburne, in the role of Troy, Wendell Pierce
played Jim Bono, Lyons was played by Kadeem Hardison, Raynell

was played by Victoria Matthews, Bryan Clark reprised Cory and
Gabriel was portrayed by Orlando Jones. Robert Verini writes of
the universality of Fences and Epps’s revival of the drama, ‘It is spe-
cific enough to act as a cornerstone of Wilson’s ten-play Pittsburgh
Cycle, yet universal enough to touch a chord in every human heart’
(Verini, 2006: 61). Particularly he noted the merits of Fishburne’s
and the other male cast members’ performances:
Fishburne may be less terrifying a figure than the original Troy,

James Earl Jones, but he is a more recognizable Everyman. . . .
Utterly real throughout are the men of the household, each
of whom Wilson uses to embody a different vision of how
one may approach life. Kadeem Hardison is definitive as
Troy’s older son Lyons . . . Clark avoids whininess as Cory. . . .
But the real acting surprise is Orlando Jones as Troy’s war-
wounded brother, who now believes he is the Archangel Gabriel.
Unhampered by this symbolic baggage, Jones demonstrates an
intensity and emotional accessibility hitherto unhinted at.
(Verini, 2006: 61)
The title of the Pasadena Playhouse’s July 2006 Press Release

announcing this production read, ‘A Landmark Event In the American
Theatre’, and Epps summed up the sentiments of many Fences
directors, especially as they produced commemorative productions
of Fences and Wilson’s other works in the period following his
demise: ‘This is our way of honoring August . . . Fences is one of my
favorite plays and what a wonderful way to introduce Playhouse
audiences to his work that [sic] with this, his most powerful and
profound piece. Fences is a beautifully written play . . .’ (‘A Landmark
Event . . .,’ 2006).
Fences made its next national presentation in Washington, DC,
at The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in March
2008. Directed by Wilsonian actor and director Kenny Leon, this

production was the fifth work presented as part of the Kennedy
Center’s August Wilson’s twentieth Century Theatrical Series, in
which each of Wilson’s 10 plays were produced, chronologically, as
staged readings beginning with Gem of the Ocean, set in 1904, and
concluding with Radio Golf, set in the 1990s.
International productions
The American universality of Fences had been tested and confirmed
by the time of its final Broadway curtain call, and in the 1990s, its
international universality would test its cross cultural translatabil-
ity. In 1996, scholar-director Margaret Booker took Fences to
the East, Beijing, China, and presented the work at the National
Theatre of China where ‘not one actor had been to America, knew
an African-American, or even spoke English’ (Booker, 1997: 50).
This production challenged Wilson’s condemnation of color-blind
casting as presented in the (in)famous ‘The Ground on Which
I Stand’ speech presented at the 1996 Theatre Communications
Group meeting and as Booker notes, as she quotes Wilson: ‘. . .
testifies to his belief that he writes about issues common to all cul-
tures, but roots them in the black experience’ (Booker, 1997: 51).
On the issue of color-blind casting Wilson stated:
Colorblind casting is an aberrant idea that has never had any

validity other than as a tool of the Cultural Imperialist who
views their American Culture, rooted in the icons of European
Culture, as beyond reproach in its perfection. . . . The idea of
colorblind casting is the same idea of assimilation that black
Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years. For the
record we reject it again. We reject any attempt to blot us out, to
reinvent history and ignore our presence or to maim our spiritual
product. (Wilson, 1997: 498–99)
However, Booker’s production of Fences appears to have offered

a compromise to color-blind casting because the actors did not
attempt to assume and imitate black people or black culture, but
they were allowed to locate Fences’s shared connections with their
own Chinese culture and act on these connections. Despite anti-
cipated cultural ‘clashes,’ Fences’s eastern debut was a resounding
success for everyone involved in and witnessing the production.
Booker, Wilson and Liu Jinyuan, the director of the Beijing People’s
Art Theatre, recognized the universal and human connections that
Fences plot identified (Booker, 1997: 50) and production began
on a play that would later edu-tain patrons who would ‘[ride]ing
bicycles one-and-one-half hours to get there (and the same time
to return home),’ and pay ‘20 to 50 yuan for a ticket on an average
salary of 400 yuan per month’ (Booker, 1997: 51).
Before Fences was ready for its Chinese production, several ste-
reotypes had to be challenged and cultural compromises would
have to be met. As with any production, the director had to instruct
the cast on the drama – context, character motivations, dialect, lan-
guage, etc.; however, Booker’s task was especially daunting because
she had to perform ‘[t]he trick’ of ‘tak[ing] something essentially
African-American and transform[ing] it into something emotion-
ally meaningful for the Chinese’ (Booker, 1997: 51). Using The
Piano Lesson (the only drama adapted into film), ‘American films,
sports videos, and blues music, and five days of thorough text work,’
Booker and the cast attempted to ‘capture the colloquialisms,
rhythm and poetry of the dialogue, and occasionally adjusted parts
of the translation to capture Wilson’s style and meaning’ (Booker,
1997: 51). Once mastered, the production was faced with the
dilemma of how to transform a Chinese actor into a black charac-
ter, physically. Booker explains this discussion:
The company, used to transforming themselves into foreigners

through wigs and makeup, were concerned about pretending to
be African American. Liang Guanhua, who played Troy, said,

‘When we first started, we thought we’d have to paint ourselves
black, but the director said “No!” I did not want black-faced car-
icatures of these very real people, but wanted the actors to think
of their characters as themselves. (Booker, 1997: 52)
Booker’s decision to avoid both black face minstrelsy and cultural

minstrelsy proved favorable and garnered praise from Beijing critics
and Mike Laris of the Washington Post who found the play to be
‘an endearing combination of 1950s Pittsburgh and 1990s Beijing’
(as quoted by Booker, 1997: 52). Xie Xizhang of the Beijing Eve-
ning News wrote of the play, ‘By the end you feel connected with
black people’s destiny. The problems Troy and his family face are
very much like those faced by average people in China’ (Booker,
1997: 52).
This production as Booker notes, and I concur, also proves the
interconnectedness between the folk of Beijing and the African-
American folk that Wilson’s works celebrate and excavate. Booker
writes of Beijing: ‘Rushing toward the 21st century on a rampage
of consumerism, China in the 90s wants to be a member of the
modern world and economic community, yet still tries to preserve
its intellectual tradition and social values. Nowhere would the
clash between old and new be more apparent’ (Booker, 1997: 50).
Immediately, this description brings forward the cultural clashes –
inter and intra – that take place within Wilson’s Fences. Lyons’s jazz
culture collides with Troy’s Blues culture; Troy’s patrilineal teach-
ings collide with Cory’s new-generational needs; Rose’s gynocentric
perspectives challenge Troy’s masculinist philosophies; and, simply,
the old ways collide with new. Liu, according to Booker, identifies
these chasms in China as a ‘generation ditch’ and Wilson identifies
this as the loss of one’s song. Despite the cultural differences (which,
though important, were few) Booker and the National Theatre
of China were able to accomplish much more than recreating
the Pittsburgh Hill District on a Chinese stage. Instead they were

able to identify ‘parallels with old Beijing’s hutongs surrounded by
modern construction and factories’ and Troy’s home in the Hill
District, and enable ‘Beijing’s older generation – veterans of the
early days of the People’s Republic, famine and political changes –
[to find] their counterparts in the Maxson family. The story of an
illiterate black garbage collector who had moved to industrial Pitts-
burgh to create a better life made lots of sense in Beijing where
former farmers clean the streets so their sons and daughters can
attend university’ (Booker, 1997: 51).
Booker’s Fences broke down cultural fences and tilled a new
ground for Wilson’s work. She even quotes Wilson saying: ‘There
are some things specific to human life being lived as a black man in
America . . . but there is no idea that cannot be contained by that.
It’s different than as a Chinese man in China, but damn if we don’t
all know a betrayal when we see one. We all have conflicts with our
parents’ (Booker, 1997: 52).
Fences has also been staged in Ghana, West Africa. Wilson
explained to Shannon and Williams that one of the differences
in this production was that Gabriel was moved into a more Greek
influenced choral position, where he would ‘speak directly to the
audience’ (Williams and Shannon, 2004: 194). Also, according to
Charles Mulekwa, three of Wilson’s works including Fences in 1988,
had been produced in Uganda, Africa. Mulekwa states that Fences’s
language ‘was considerably different from what we were accustomed
to, but the dramatic quality of human aspirations and the struggle
to be human in the face of other people, were so resonant’ (www.
earthtimes.org Monday, 3 October 2005).
From page to stage, from stage to screen? – The Filmic

Translation of August Wilson’s Fences
Fences earned August Wilson numerous awards, solidified his pres-
ence on Broadway, and began to secure him the title of one of
America’s greatest playwrights.. However, the controversy surround-

ing this drama’s planned film adaptation also revealed and reminded
Wilson’s supporters, dramatic scholars and critics that Wilson was,
first and foremost, ‘a race man’. In 1987, Paramount Pictures pur-
chased the rights to create a filmic adaptation of Fences for $500,000
that would be produced by and star comedian-actor Eddie Murphy
in the role of Lyons. Eddie Murphy’s name, like James Earl Jones’s
on the marquee of the theatre, would assure Paramount a wide and
diverse audience, but little did Murphy or the studio anticipate
August Wilson’s powerful protection of the cultural integrity of his
work.
Wilson began composing the screenplay in 1989, but the pro-
duction was already mired in debate because Wilson preferred
that the studio hire a black director to oversee the adaptation. This
request placed Wilson and the studio (and Murphy) at odds, espe-
cially because Paramount had already identified a director for the
film – Barry Levinson. However, Levinson did not meet Wilson’s cri-
teria. In the opinion piece, ‘I Want a Black Director’ Wilson clearly
articulates his reasons for preventing Paramount from adapting
Fences without the directorial perspective of a black director:
When they had lined up Barry Levinson . . . I met with Barry.

Barry wanted to do the film, so I went over [to] Paramount’s
office and said, ‘I don’t want Barry to do the film. He doesn’t
qualify’. A qualification was that the director had to be black,
that he have some sensibilities to the culture.
This is a drama about the culture. And in these instances,
I think you should hire . . . if this were a film about Italian culture,
you should hire an Italian director. This is common sense. Now,
if you have an adventure movie that’s not specific to a particular
culture, you can hire anybody to direct that. (Wilson, 1994)
In order to assist Paramount in fulfilling his request, James

Greenberg writes that Wilson and his attorney John Breglio
submitted a list of potential candidates for the position that

included Spike Lee, Lloyd Richards, Gordon Parks and Charles
Burnett; and later Warrington Hudlin (then president of the Black
Film Makers’ Foundation), and at Mr Breglio’s request, compiled a
second list of 12 additional candidates for the job (Greenberg,
1991: 2–3). As of January 1991, Greenberg stated that Bill Duke
was the ‘front runner for the job’; however, Fences has yet to appear
on the big screen. According to Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Wilson had
completed the final draft of Fences’s screenplay in 2003. Interest-
ingly, this adaptation removed Alberta, Troy’s mistress, from the
shadows and gave her a speaking role in the work, and Wilson had
begun to cast the filmic adaptation himself with Marion McClin-
ton as director, Alfre Woodard as Rose, and Oprah Winfrey in the
role of Alberta (Snodgrass, 2004: 19).
While Wilson offers a compelling argument in ‘I Want a Black
Director’ that is consistent with the cultural–political position pre-
sented in the ‘The Ground on Which I Stand’ speech delivered at
the 1996 Theatre Communications Group meeting, scholar Michael
Awkward offers an enlightening critique of the gaps in Wilson’s logic
that cause his demand for a black director to be both contradictory
to his accomplishments as a black playwright whose success has
largely come from white theatre patrons. Awkward’s critique of the
play and his response to Wilson’s call for a black director illustrates
just one of the responses to Wilson’s request. Germane to Awkward’s
argument is that Wilson’s requirement that Fences’s director be black
is a complicated one because his argument excludes both non-black
and non-black identifying blacks from consideration. Moreover,
Awkward asserts that Wilson’s position contradicts the reality of
American cultural exchange:
But his argument is weakened, in my view, by his efforts to

polarize white and black means of access to Euro-American and
‘foreign’ (in this case, black) cultural production. The problem is
not that his exploration of traditional caucacentric perspectives

on black art is unpersuasive but rather that he suggests, despite
the technological advances that have made possible a wider
dissemination of black cultural material, that an Afro-American
ethos remains inherently less available to a white interpreter
than, say, the aesthetics of Euro-American drama are to a black
American such as himself. (1994: 213)
Awkward’s point is interesting and illustrates the inherent com-

plexity of August Wilson’s cultural perspective and dramatic vision,
especially as it supports Wilson’s position against color-blind casting,
but challenges the overarching universality of his works. However,
while I support Wilson’s desire to preserve cultural authenticity for
his work and what I identify as his way to remind the ‘powers that
be’ that talented and qualified African-American film directors do
and have existed, Awkward’s argument demands that closer exami-
nations of the concept of cultural ownership take place so that
American theatrical and filmic discussions may become truly uni-
versal entities. Most importantly, Awkward’s position illustrates
Wilson’s ability, through his work and his words, to raise important
questions concerning the true state of American culture.
Fences, the drama, became Wilson’s ‘Everyman’ play for the
Broadway stage. Paramount Pictures probably banked on Fences,
the film, as being another film that would illustrate its appreciation
of diversity and its desire to move toward presenting more amelio-
rative images of black life. For Wilson, then, to prevent the play’s
adaptation appears to be a counteractive movement to align Ameri-
cans and American dramatists on a ‘common ground’ (Wilson, 1996:
502), but I suggest that actors, audiences, scholars, critics and teach-
ers reconsider Wilson’s over-protectiveness of his drama and
appreciate the cultural baggage that he has brought along with him
into the theatre world. Wilson’s biographical information sheds
insight into the life of a man who faced racism head on within the
American educational system, who heard the tales of black southern

life from his poolroom professors and, when on the road to success,
‘almost’ fell victim to forces that wanted him to transform Ma Rain-
ey’s Black Bottom from a drama into a musical. Hence, by the time
Paramount optioned Fences, Wilson had already been introduced to
non-African-American conceptualizations of his work, and appears
to have decided that he must protect the sanctity of his vision.
The Fences saga began in 1987, but the film adaptation has yet to
be made. In the end, Wilson has been able to protect his dramatic
vision until Paramount chooses to honor his request to hire a black
director for the project. Fortunately, one August Wilson work has
been adapted into film. In 1995, Wilson’s The Piano Lesson was
presented on CBS’s Hallmark Hall of Fame. Wilson authored the
screenplay and his friend and director Marion McClinton, an
African-American director, directed the production. It is interesting
that CBS allowed Wilson’s ownership and artistic control of this
piece, but Paramount Pictures could not, initially, understand his
need to tell his story and sing his song in his own way.
4 Workshopping the Play
This chapter offers a series of practical workshop exercises based on

Fences. It involves discussion of the play’s characters, conflicts, key
scenes, motifs and ideas which a group of student actors could explore.
The content is also informed by interviews with actors and directors
who have been involved in professional productions of the play.
The world of Fences: a contextual approach

Fences offers a glance back in time to the years preceding the 1960s
and the American Civil Rights movement. It addresses the con-
tinued complexities of (specifically) a black man and (generally) a
people, who both have managed to survive slavery, sharecropping,
disenfranchisement and racial segregation. Fences, however, is a fic-
tion, a didactic fiction. It is not an historical piece, but rather a
piece that uses history as its foundation as it presents a multifaceted
examination of various -isms that plagued and continue to plague
both the black man and black culture. Fences affords actors and stu-
dents the opportunity to travel back into the lives of their parents,
grandparents and great-grandparents to begin to understand the
importance of knowing and reconnecting one’s self to one’s history,
a lesson that August Wilson emphasized in his twentieth-century
cycle of plays.
Visualization
Actors should be immersed in Fences’s world through various forms of
media. In order to begin to understand the history of Troy Maxson’s
character as the son of a sharecropper, actors should, as a group,

view historical videos and documentaries that present images of the
South and the Great Migration. The Blackside Film and Video pro-
duction company’s award winning Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil
Rights Movement 1954–1985 and the WGBH-produced Reconstruc-
tion: The Second Civil War offer historical discussions of the America
that the ancestors of Fences’s characters called home, and serve as
moving contexts through which to interpret Troy’s anger, Rose’s
determination, and a means to understand the significance of Troy’s
request that he be allowed to drive the rubbish truck instead of rid-
ing on back. In order to understand more fully how and why African
Americans migrated from the South to the North, actors should visit
‘In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience’ at The
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s website (http://
www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/landing.cfm?migration=
8&bhcp=1). This site provides statistical information, photographs
and primary source documents that serve as a record of the number
of Africans Americans who, like Troy, found their way to the North.
A less historical, but more popular culture influenced visualiza-
tion exercise could be a contrast of Fences’s setting and characters
with the 1950s set American situation comedy Happy Days. This
program, which ran on American television from 1974 to 1984,
centered on the angst of white American middle-class teenagers
and their ‘leader’ Fonzie, a working-class renegade. I can recall one
episode where the comedy’s lead character, Richie Cunningham,
and his family have to deal with the complexities of an African-
American family moving into their neighborhood, but the pro-
gram’s white, Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based world sits in direct
contrast to the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Hill District where Troy
fights to raise his family. It is through this contrast that the actors
may begin to understand or decry Wilson’s focus on black culture
as a specific and unique culture, and trouble his focus to note that
Workshopping the Play 65
despite race, any American who does not fit into the mainstream
or rather privileged class, for example like Fonzie, finds it difficult
to assimilate into a hegemonic ideal.
Numerous visuals will enable actors to begin to understand
Fences’s world, but actors should also experience this world aurally –
through African-American music and folklore. Actors should
study the musical genre blues either beginning with Bessie Smith’s
‘Nobody Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine’, which was one of
Wilson’s initial influences for his dramatic cycle, or listening to
recordings of Mississippi Blues singers such as Robert Johnson and
Muddy Waters. Blues songs are not main characters in Fences, as
they were in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, but Troy’s song, ‘Old Blue’,
is both his song and his legacy to his children. Actors should be
asked to listen to the stories relayed in the blues songs selected
and note their rhythms and patterns. Then, each actor should either
sing Troy’s song individually or in pairs in order to workshop
Raynell and Cory’s duet in the play’s last scene and experience the
bond that this blues song creates between Troy’s children, between
Troy and his children and, if performed correctly, between Troy and
the audience.
Reading Fences: the ground

on which Wilson stands
Before actors can effectively workshop Fences, they must first
understand the drama’s culture and the dramatist’s perspective. The
didactic approach suggested in the previous section of this chapter
will enable actors to begin to understand the historical period in
which the play’s plot unfolds, but in order to understand Wilson’s
perspective, actors must study Wilson’s dramatic manifesto –‘The
Ground on Which I Stand’.
‘The Ground on Which I Stand’ is the keynote address that Wilson
delivered at the 1996 Theatre Communications Group meeting.
In this address, Wilson first identifies and pays homage to both his
cultural and dramatic ancestors:
In one guise the ground I stand on has been pioneered by

the Greek dramatists, by Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles, by
William Shakespeare, by Shaw and Ibsen, and by the American
dramatists Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
In another guise the ground that I stand on has been pioneered
by my grandfather, by Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, by Martin
Delaney, Marcus Garvey and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
That is the ground of the affirmation of the value of one being,
an affirmation of his worth in the face of the society’s urgent and
sometimes profound denial. It was this ground as a young man
coming into manhood, searching for something to which to
dedicate my life, that I discovered in the Black Power movement
of the 1960s. (Wilson, 1997: 493–94)
Wilson then asserts that he is a ‘race man’: ‘That is simply that

I believe that race matters. That is the largest, most identifiable,
and most important part of our personality. It is the largest category
of identification because it is the one that most influences your
perception of yourself, and it is the one to which others in the world
of men most respond’ (Wilson, 1997: 494). This speech takes
an interesting turn when Wilson begins to challenge the practice
of color-blind casting and equates it with almost four centuries of
African-American ‘assimilation’ (Wilson, 1997: 498):
To mount an all black production of Death of a Salesman or any

other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the
human condition through the specific of white culture is to deny
us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make
our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we
stand as black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, our

difficult but honorable history in America, and an insult to
our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied
contributions to the society and the world at large. The idea of
colorblind casting is the same idea of assimilation that black
Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years. For the
record we reject it again. We reject any attempt to blot us out, to
reinvent history and ignore our presence or to maim our spiritual
product. . . . We do not need colorblind casting. We need some
theaters to develop our playwrights. (Wilson, 1997: 499)
Wilson’s address, after indicting American funding agencies for

ignoring and under-subsidizing black theatre companies and play-
wrights, closes with a unifying thought and tone that ‘together’
black and white American theatre practitioners may correct past
wrongs and support black theatre in the manner that it should
have been:
The ground together. We have to do it together. We cannot per-

mit our lives to waste away, our talents unchallenged. We cannot
permit a failure to our duty. We are brave and we are boisterous,
our mettle is proven, and we are dedicated.
The ground together. The ground of the American theater on
which I am proud to stand . . . the ground which our artistic
ancestors purchased with their endeavors . . . with their pursuit
of the American spirit and its ideals. (Wilson, 1997: 503)
Discussion and writing

Who, then, should be cast in an August Wilson drama? Directors
should assist actors as they explore this question and Wilson’s position
on color-blind casting. Hence, the second part of Fences’s workshop
should be a discussion about color-blind casting. Actors should

respond to the following questions:
z Is Wilson’s position on color-blind casting a valid one?

z Despite Wilson’s position, should any actor, regardless of race or
ethnicity, be allowed to portray a Wilsonian character?
z After reading Wilson’s ‘The Ground on Which I Stand’ speech,
I feel . . .
z How has reading Fences and the address effected my interpreta-
tion of the play and understanding of Wilson’s dramatic vision?
The aim of these questions is to enable actors, especially non-

African-American actors who may agree with Wilson, to discern the
difference between reading the play within a classroom setting and
a public performance. In an educational setting, students, actors
and teachers should not shy away from ‘performing’ Wilson because
they fear disrespecting his work. Instead, this type of setting affords
all persons, regardless of race, the opportunity to experience the
universality of Wilson’s characters and their words. Moreover, allow-
ing and encouraging students to ‘become’ Troy, Rose, Cory or
Gabriel further accomplishes the goal of theatre that Wilson notes
in ‘The Ground on Which I Stand’:
Theater asserts that all of human life is universal. Love, Honor,

Duty, Betrayal belong and pertain to every culture or race. The
way they are acted out on the playing field may be different,
but betrayal is betrayal whether you are a South Sea Islander,
Mississippi farmer, or an English Baron. All of human life is uni-
versal, and it is theater that illuminates and confers upon the
universal the ability to speak for all men. (Wilson, 1997: 503)
A professional production of Fences, however, launches a different

discussion. Actors should revisit the questions posed in the previous
discussion and writing section, with the additional question of

does an actor, director and/or theatre company have a responsibility
to honor a dramatist’s casting desires? Fences’s stage directions do
not include the words ‘the people in this play are black’ as did, for
example, several of Ed Bullins’s works, one of Wilson’s dramatic
influences. Yet, in ‘The Ground on Which I Stand’ and several
interviews, Wilson clearly states his position, and despite this omis-
sion, he composed Fences about African-American characters and
African-American culture.
Fences: performing the play

Actors should be asked to read Fences and Wilson’s ‘The Ground on
Which I Stand’ speech before attending the workshop, and keep
a journal of questions and initial responses to the play (structure,
stage directions), its characters, language and Wilson’s address. The
following questions may serve as response prompts:
z Which character would I most like to portray and why? What

traits does this character possess?
z How does music work within this play?
z What is the theme of this work?
z What is the most intriguing line, monologue, or moment in the
play?
z Do I see a relative or friend reflected in this play?
z What has changed from the play’s beginning to the play’s end?
The workshop should begin with a 30–45 minute discussion in

which each actor summarizes his pre-workshop journal responses
to the play, specifically focusing on the African-American culture
that Wilson seeks to present and preserve in his works. After this
discussion, the drama should be read act by act, with the actors
reading the scenes first through their own cultural tones, attitudes
and mannerisms, and then from Wilson’s race-specific cultural

perspective. This exercise should accomplish two things: (1) The
actors will have the opportunity to test Wilson’s color-blind casting
assertion; and (2) The actors will begin to understand why Wilson
is intent on upholding African-American cultural nuances and
motifs. Following each scene, the actors should revisit the questions
posed in the pre-workshop exercise and pose new questions about
the play. (Note: A dry erase board set up during workshop will
enable the actors to write down their questions for all to see and
consider later.) At the workshop’s end, the actors will leave with an
expanded list of questions and responses to consider as they begin
to better understand Wilson and Fences, and locate their theatrical
selves within its pages.
A focus on character
After approaching Fences as a socio-historical work, actors should
spend time working within the characters themselves. This approach
asks that actors focus mainly on the character questions posed
in the initial workshop, especially because Fences is Wilson’s only
character-driven play (the other nine works are more ensemble-
focused). Also, this approach encourages students to locate both the
specificity of the African-American male character and the human-
ity that enables these characters to be recognized and appreciated
within any culture. The actors should also remain cognizant of
Wilson’s focus on realism. Fences is a realistic drama from beginning
to end, and its characters must be portrayed in this way. Thus as
the actors participate in the following exercises, they should always
think of the characters as real human beings, not fictionalized
stereotypes or figments of one’s imagination.
Troy Maxson: the everyman

James Earl Jones immortalized the role of Troy Maxson at Yale and
on Broadway, and offers an imperative piece of advice for the actor
who will portray Troy or any other Wilsonian character: ‘It’s hard
for an actor to go wrong if he’s true to the words August Wilson has
written’ (Jones, 2001: 84). Troy’s character should be played along
with each character in the drama, individually and collectively. For
example, the actors should pull out the scenes (see key scenes for
suggestions) in which Troy participates in a one-on-one, or rather
one-against-one dialogue with another character. The ‘I am having
an affair scene’ between Troy and Rose, and ‘the father–son battle’
between Troy and Cory are two scenes that will demonstrate Troy’s
‘power’ and the other characters’ powers also, especially to be bold
and strong enough to verbally and, in Cory’s case, physically chal-
lenge Troy.
Actor Ron McCall, who portrayed Troy in the Houston, Texas-
based Ensemble Theatre Company’s 2002 production of Fences,
tells interviewer Everett Evans that he followed Wilson’s advice for
portraying his characters: ‘One thing August has taught me is that
to do his plays effectively, you can’t judge his characters. If you start
off being too judgmental about their actions, you can’t take the
full journey with them’ (Evans, 2002: 11). Hence, actors should
visualize Fences’s characters individually and without critique of
their actions or statements so that they may forge a connection
between the characters and themselves.
An interesting exercise centering on Troy’s character is one where
actors, both male and female, are asked to select one of Troy’s
speeches or stories, and recite it as if they were the Troy that they
have visualized. Next, the actors should perform this same speech
as the Troy whom they think Wilson created – a responsible, but
flawed, black male survivor. This exercise will afford actors numer-
ous opportunities to ‘hear’ and ‘see’ the different forms that Troy’s
character may take in comparison to the Wilsonian ideal for Troy.
Additionally, this approach will enable female actors the opportu-
nity to experience Troy’s side of the story before enacting the role
of Rose. Playing Rose after portraying Troy will allow the actors
who read Rose’s lines to understand what Rose means when she says
that she allowed Troy’s needs and wants to consume her, and admits
that she is responsible for her actions.
After reading one of Troy’s speeches or stories, consider the fol-
lowing explanation for his actions and words and compare it with
your own reflections on the character.
Troy Maxson, just as does the play, sits on the cusp of change.
Within his person are scars of his past and revolutionary inklings
of the change that would come in the decade of the 1960s. Troy’s
grand stature and selfishness should be mixed with humor and
confusion and, for the actor who assumes this role, demonstrated
at all times on the stage. It should be remembered that Troy, like Ma
Rainey’s Levee, embodies the warrior, has survived homelessness,
hunger, imprisonment, and attempted to be a responsible husband,
father, and man. A former Negro League Baseball player, Troy
should be portrayed as a competitor who, despite what others say,
refuses to accept the fact that he is too old to play ball anymore.
Instead, he creates a metaphorical baseball stadium from the mate-
rials of his life, and both plays in and umpires game after game until
he finally strikes out.
Actors should then be asked the following questions:
z If Troy were an animal, what type of animal would he be?

z Is Troy a survivor?
z What is Troy’s real character flaw?
z Is Troy a character that you, regardless of ethnicity or gender,
empathize with?
z Do men like Troy exist in other cultures? What are their stories?
z Is Troy an everyman character?
Jim Bono: the friend

Jim Bono’s character is the admitted follower in this drama. Bono’s
character is one that all of the actors should experience, for friendship,
like many of Fences’s themes, is a universal relation that most indi-

viduals experience at least once during their lifetimes.
The first exercise that the actors should participate in is one that
has been used in numerous team building programs – the trust fall.
The actors should be paired and given 5 minutes to discuss the con-
cept of trust. Although the actors may not have met prior to this
workshop, they should begin to think of themselves as members
of a group or team who must trust and work together to offer a
seamless production of the work. After this brief discussion, one
actor in each pairing should be blindfolded. Once blindfolded, that
actor should stand and reflect upon the devotion that Bono expresses
toward Troy. Bono clearly believes that Troy is a good person; hence,
Bono should also know that if he falls, Troy will catch him. This is
the type of faith that the blindfolded actor should try to imitate as
she prepares to continue this exercise. When mentally prepared, the
blindfolded actor should simply fall back and the sighted actor
should catch his partner before she hits the ground. This exercise
should be repeated with the sighted actor now being blindfolded.
Also, this exercise may be carried out with the entire group.
Although Fences’s stage directions describe Bono as an admiring
follower, actors should be careful not portray this as a weakness.
Actors should consider the strength that is needed to try to follow
a man like Troy. Moreover, actors should remember that Bono has
experienced many of the same things – prison, inadequate housing,
poverty, hard work, love – that Troy has, but he admires the manner
in which Troy has met these challenges. Troy, then, is Bono’s role
model. The following exercise should enable actors to comprehend
this point.
The role-modeling exercise asks actors to consider one actor or
director whom they consider to be their artistic role model. Before
the group, the actors should perform the character of their artistic
role model. For example, the actor who selects James Earl Jones
should recite the lines and act in the way that Jones has in any one
of his stage or screen performances. After each actor has had the
opportunity to role-play as his role model, the actors should think
about how their role model would portray either Bono or one of
the drama’s other characters. Granted, this exercise does not focus
upon friendship, but it focuses on admiration and imitation, both
traits that Bono and Cory exhibit within the work.
Wilson’s woman: playing Rose Maxson

Although in several interviews Wilson stated that women were not
the primary focus of his work, at least his early work, Rose Maxson’s
powerful voice emerged early in his dramatic cycle the cycle and
became a model for the female characters who would follow her.
Stage and screen actress Mary Alice originated the role of Rose in a
workshop at the Yale Repertory Theatre and carried it on through to
Broadway. Alice was able to model Rose on the women in her fam-
ily – her mother and grandmother – in order to create a character
whose love for her family and honest assessment led to a character
who was just as strong as Troy (Bennetts, 1987).
Rose’s character should be carefully studied and understood by
students who wish to play her. Just as Alice culled lessons from the
female branches of her family tree, students should research and
note the feminist struggles of their foremothers. For students who
may not be able to locate a woman who in Rose’s words accepted
‘what life offered her as woman’, I suggest that they examine histo-
ries and images of black women. Moreover, although Wilson already
introduced the quintessential blues woman with the character
Ma Rainey, and Rose is introduced approximately 20 years follow-
ing the prominence of blues women, students should listen to
recordings by female blues artists and read blues lyrics in order to
understand Rose’s lament, anger and ability to make Troy a ‘wom-
anless man’ without leaving her home or her marriage.
After studying Rose and the histories of African-American women,
actors should cull Rose’s parts from the play text and use them as
they visualize and contrast Rose of 1957 to a twenty-first-century

Rose. Questions to consider:
z Does Rose still exist? How does she look, sound, act?
z How does she walk and stand?
z Are all women Rose? Is she vulnerable or strong?
z If Rose were an animal, which animal would she be?
Rose’s character is a particularly ideal character to workshop inter-

ethnically, for her character encompasses two American second-class
citizens – African Americans and women. Actors should be encour-
aged to consider how Rose’s powerful words and emotion may be
part of the larger world of women, who in many cultures of the
world have had to ‘settle for [what] the world [had] offered them’
as women. However, Rose’s character as an African-American
woman should also be fully considered, for in adherence to
Wilson’s vision, her African-Americanness further complicates her
femaleness.
Actors should workshop Rose speaking from the perspectives of
women from different eras, races, countries, educational and socio-
economic levels. For example, how would Rose respond to Troy
if she were a college-educated woman? Imagine a Rose and Troy
who were West Indian? How would Rose sound and what cultural
differences would be illustrated in her role? What if Rose were a
descendant of the numerous Irish immigrants who settled in the
Hill District? Lastly, actors should visualize and portray Rose dur-
ing different eras in women’s history and African-American history:
1890s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, 1980s, and 2008, and ask if
Rose would have been the same or different? If so, how and why?
Lyons Maxson: the musician

Lyons Maxson is Fences’s outsider. While he is Troy’s son and Cory’s
brother, he does not reflect Troy’s influences as much as the other
characters do. Lyons is a jazz man; he performs and lives his life
according to the chords of ‘Chinese music’, Troy’s term for Lyons’s
chosen musical genre. Thus, he is a foreigner, at least in Troy’s world,
who crosses the borders into and out of the Maxson yard for the
purpose of borrowing and repaying money from his biological
father.
The actor who portrays Lyons needs to attempt to locate his
center and motivation, and answer the question: how does Lyons
measure up to Troy? One exercise that will enable an actor to begin
to dissect Lyons’s character is to first consider his name and imagine
him possessing lion-like qualities. Is Lyons ‘the king of the jungle’?
Is he a skilled hunter? Is he a worthy opponent for his father?
In order to begin to answer these questions, the actor should be
paired with the actor portraying Troy and, using one of the key
scenes discussed in Chapter 2, portray Lyons as if he were a human
possessing lion-like characteristics. If this exercise is effective, the
actor will see that Lyons is able to move to his own rhythm because
he is both a visitor and the untamed kernel of Troy’s psyche. Lyons
and Troy are essentially one and the same, for they are determined
to live according to their own mandates. Lyons’s foreign or rather
outsider status, however, has protected him from Troy’s attempts
to control and shape him as he does with Cory.
Cory Maxson: mirroring the father

Actor Courtney B. Vance starred in the role of Cory Maxson in
both the Yale Repertory and Broadway productions. New York
Times theatre critic Frank Rich applauded his portrayal of Troy’s
son/protégé and noted that Vance’s portrayal of Cory provided the
comparable strength needed when played against James Earl Jones’s
Troy. At the end of the play, Rose tells Cory that he is just like his
father. Hence, actors should attempt to locate Troy inside of Cory
and ask the question: despite their battles, how are they even more
akin than biological father and son?
Actors should perform Cory as a mirror image of Troy. Through-

out the play, Cory mimics Troy’s actions, and, as Rose points out,
he is more like his father than he knows. Thus, actors should stage
Troy and Cory as ‘twins’. Cory should posses Troy’s walk, posture
and some slight head tilt that not only illustrates the statement,
‘like father, like son’, but also illuminates the characteristics that
these two warring characters share. The actor who portrays Cory
should also remember that he is a man-child, Troy’s man-child.
A high-school senior, Cory is a young adult, but also the son of his
domineering father. Thus, as he imitates Troy, his mimicry should
be slightly adolescent and awkward. After the actor has mastered
Troy’s movements alone, the actors should workshop any of the
scenes that feature Troy and Cory together. A powerful scene in
which to stage this mirror image is the scene where Cory and Troy
struggle for the bat, and then Cory is banished to the other side of
the fence. Both actors should place their hands on the bat (they will
be facing each other) and then take turns improvising what they
would want to say to each other if they could.
Gabriel Maxson: the spectacle character

Gabriel Maxson is Fences’s spectacle character. He has few lines
but his movements (walk and posture), especially because he is a
wounded war veteran, speak volumes about his character. Gabriel is
a character who must be read and visualized both psychologically
and physically. His character utilizes his entire person – externally and
internally – as it conveys his belief in his brother’s humanity and
candidacy for heaven. Gabriel is a character whose subtle lessons are
overshadowed by Troy’s bold pronouncements. His independence
is the core of his personality, but this is shrouded by his seeming
mental handicap. In order to locate this aspect of Gabriel’s charac-
ter, actors are asked to identify a physical trait or movement (such
as a limp, wink, whistle or hand gesture) or utilize a particular tone,
dialect and volume for Gabriel’s voice that could be his ‘trademark’.
Once identified, the actors should merge Gabriel’s word with his
trademark and use them to enhance Gabriel’s character and move
him from the drama’s periphery.
Actors should be careful to workshop Gabriel’s character more
in the light of a court jester and not an imbecile. Each actor, regard-
less of gender, should perform Gabriel’s character so that they may
understand how the drama’s other characters react and respond to
him. The first exercise asks that each actor attempts to ‘become
Gabriel’. Each actor should, based upon their interpretation of the
character and script, role-play as if they were Gabriel, remembering
that Gabriel is a wounded war veteran, an entrepreneur, a bachelor
and a member of the Maxson family. The challenge will be for the
actors to balance all of Gabriel’s self-actualized characteristics with
the reality of his illness – his belief that he is the Angel Gabriel.
Gabriel’s character should also be exercised with the words ‘I AM A
MAN’ at the fore of each actor’s mind, for Gabriel is as much a
Maxson man as Troy is.
Actors should locate Gabriel’s masculinity alongside of his
disconnection from reality by speaking Gabriel’s lines and insert the
phrase ‘I am a man’ either at the beginning or at the end of the lines.
By merging this phrase with the script, the actors should begin to
uncover that despite his position in society and the Maxson family,
Gabriel understands both who and what he is. A second exercise
asks that the actors form pairs with one actor representing society
and the other character portraying Gabriel. The actor portraying
society should ask the actor portraying Gabriel questions and make
comments to which Gabriel will respond simply ‘I am a man’. The
aim of this exercise is to challenge the actors to use this phrase as
means to communicate a list of other responses and emotions
such as: ‘You have to recognize me’, ‘I am deserving of your kind-
ness’, ‘I am not invisible’, ‘I exist’ and ‘I am sane’.
This last suggestion leads to the second exercise that actors should
undertake when working with Gabriel’s character. While Gabriel
and Troy do not have the same type of conflicting relationship

that Troy has with everyone else in his family, Gabriel and Troy are
conflicting or rather contrasting parts of the same whole. Hence,
this exercise requires that Gabriel’s and Troy’s dialogue be performed
together, and that Gabriel’s last words and actions be performed
against one or more of Troy’s stories or speeches. This exercise will
reveal the differences between the brothers, but also remind the
actors that despite their differences Troy and Gabriel are brothers
who are the sons of an embittered sharecropping father. Thus, they
share a familial legacy and a social and cultural history as black
men in the 1950s. Moreover, contrasting these two characters
further illumines the centrality of family and kinship in Fences; a
kinship that will remain despite how much one family member
hurts the others.
Fences: the setting

Mastering the language and the characteristics of Fences’s characters
is a vital component of a workshop. Yet, Fences’s title and setting
should also be workshopped as vital components of each character’s
persona and the drama’s overall theme. In order to accomplish this
a connection should be made between the setting’s fence, porch,
yard, and the Maxson home. The actors should discuss and visual-
ize these inanimate objects as imperative structures in human being’s
lives. This exercise will require three actors working in tandem. One
actor will be the fence, another the yard, and the third actor will
portray either the Maxson’s home or the home’s porch. The group
members should arrange themselves as their respective ‘characters’ –
fence, yard and home or porch – and speak to one another about their
relation to one another, especially as objects and places where humans
interact. Because much of Fences’s plot takes place in, on or around
these spaces, the actors should familiarize themselves with these spaces
and use this knowledge as they construct the characters’ roles.
Conflicts and key scenes

Fences is riddled with conflicts. From its title on through its final
scene, numerous opportunities for exploration of these conflicts
arise. This section will offer suggestions for which conflicts and keys
scenes should be explored within a workshop setting.
Fathers and sons

The conflict between Troy and Cory dominates the drama, but the
most important scene that illustrates this conflict is the scene in
which Cory is banished from his family’s home. This scene is imper-
ative to the drama’s meaning, for it simultaneously illustrates Cory’s
exit from his father’s home and into a world in which he can forge
for himself. Moreover, this scene and exemplifies the meaning of
the adage ‘history repeats itself ’. As this scene is workshopped, stu-
dents must remain cognizant of the African-American male’s
struggle to parent in a world in which he is continuously forced to
prove that he is a man, a citizen, a human being and also to believe
it. The struggle between Cory and Troy in this scene builds from a
look (a hard stare) into a verbal fisticuffs, and then into a struggle
for the bat, an ironic symbol of baseball, the great American sport,
and manhood in that it bears a strong resemblance to a phallus, the
symbol of masculinity. Cory loses the bat at this scene’s conclusion,
and, as mentioned, is banished to the other side of the fence and
outside of his house, but he should not exit this scene dejected or
emasculated because he has lost the bat. Instead, he should leave his
father’s house disheveled, but confident that if he has become bold
enough to challenge his father, he has become bold enough to chal-
lenge the world. He has become a man.
Fences provides an excellent opportunity for students to workshop
conflicting dialogue, particularly exchanges between a husband and
wife. The scenes between Troy and Rose run the gamut from being
loving exchanges where Troy tells his tales and Rose chastises him
for his lies and brashness, to lengthy and desperate explanations of
Troy’s needs and Rose’s sacrifices, and questions and statements

concerning their daily lives. As students workshop any of these
marital conflicts, they must be constantly aware of the state of the
black family in 1957. Troy and Rose, on the one hand, have beaten
the odds. Troy is employed as a garbage man, first a loader, and by
the play’s end a driver, and Rose is a homemaker. They own a home,
have a son, and for all sakes and purposes are living within a nuclear
family – the antithesis to the pervading stereotypical lives of many
African-American families. They work from paycheck to paycheck
and love one another as best they can. They have been a unit for 18
years and have lived as close to the American dream as America will
allow. With this in mind, students should pay close attention to the
meaning of marriage for the African-American culture, remember-
ing that African-American slaves were not allowed to be legally
joined, and that after emancipation and during the Reconstruction
Period, many African Americans sought to make their unions legal
as means to protect their family unit. For Rose marriage is sacred
and important despite the sacrifice, so Troy’s infidelity has done
more than wound her; it has also wounded the idea of black
marriage that she has desperately attempted to create for their
family.
Two scenes focus on the Maxsons’ marital discord. The first is when
Troy announces his affair and impending fatherhood affair and
Rose opens up about the truth of her standing next to him for 18
years (162, 163, 165). This scene is filled with rage, passion, tears,
disillusionment and pain from both parties. It should be staged as a
duet with the actors sharing the emotional language, but speaking
different words. One way to workshop this scene is to have the
actors sit facing one another and read the parts with only the script
between them. A second exercise for this same scene places the
actors on opposite sides of the stage, fence or porch. This way the
distance between Troy’s thoughts and Rose’s thoughts is both verbal
and visual, and creates a space where their differing perspectives
collide and dissolve into the air. A third exercise would have Troy
and Rose move up and down the porch’s stairs as they speak their
lines, trying to achieve their objectives, with Rose standing on the
porch as her last ‘stage’. This last exercise visualizes the discord
between Troy and Rose, and allows Rose’s character to have full
attention as she counters Troy’s arguments.
The second example of the Troy–Rose conflict should be rife with
tension but also with compassion. Like its visual influence, Bearden’s
painting Continuities, Troy’s standing in the yard with the baby in
his arms should be staged as a dramatic representation of the actual
collage, highlighted by the characters’ words. During this scene,
Troy’s voice should be strong but he should falter at times and
almost whisper when he addresses the infant in his arms. Rose’s
voice should now be the commanding and declarative one. As she
speaks, her words should sound cold, distant and emit an indiffer-
ence that has come from months of pent-up anger. Rose’s final
words in this scene are the most stinging and should be literally
hurled at Troy as she takes the baby into her arms and walks away
from him.
This scene should be workshopped using again a spatial hierarchy
with Rose on the porch, her stage, and Troy in the yard, humbled
and in a sense begging Rose through his fumbling cradling of the
baby, Raynell, for her assistance. Rose possesses all of the power in
this scene, and her role must present this. Her final words, which
are some of the most memorable and powerful of all of Wilson’s
female characters, should be delivered with a tone of finality.
A second exercise asks that actors improvise and state what other
things Rose and Troy might have said to each other in this scene.
Actors should ponder what they think Troy wishes he could say or
what they think he should say, then speak these lines. The actors
portraying Rose should expand her few lines and state what they
think she really feels in both her heart and soul, but refuses to state.
Friendship
Friendship is an important component of Fences’s plot. The drama
begins with the friends, Troy and Bono, entering the Maxson yard,
and the drama concludes with Bono, along with Troy’s family, in
the Maxson yard preparing to bury his flawed hero, his friend. All
of the actors involved in a production of Fences should recognize
this illustration of male bonding, for it furthers Wilson’s dogmatic
desire to depict the struggles and survival of black men. By allowing
Troy and Bono to be friends, especially with the hyper-masculine
Troy telling his friend, ‘I love you nigger’ (152), Wilson challenges
existing stereotypes about black men lacking the ability to love and
bond with others.
Actors should test this theme by reflecting on the friendships that
they have had and transfer those feelings into Troy’s and Bono’s
relationship. Also, actors should improvise a scene in which Troy
and Bono tell each other why they are friends, and why they value
one another’s friendship. Each actor should take turns saying one
sentence that begins ‘I value your friendship because __’. Another
suggestion for this motif is to have actors physically demonstrate
ways that men illustrate friendship through special handshakes,
high-fives, coded language and/or gestures. Actors should be cre-
ative and challenge themselves to consider how men from various
cultures physically demonstrate the friendship bond. The actors
should work together in pairs to develop several different friendship
techniques and present them to the group. This simple exercise will
help to replicate, again, Fences’s realism.
Motifs and ideas to explore

What makes a man?
As Fences’s scholars and critics have noted, the play is a rites of pas-
sage drama. It is a work that centers upon the trials that, specifically,
male characters must undergo before they can be crowned with the
title ‘man’. However, once all of Fences’s rites of passage ceremonies
have concluded, the question of what makes a man looms. Is a man
a responsible being as Troy Maxson boasts that he is? Is a man a
loving brute who rules his home with an iron fist? ‘What is a man?’
is the question that Troy struggled to answer because he had to
assemble an image of manhood from scraps of masculinity shown
to him by his estranged father and within a racist society that refused
to see him as a man.
Legacy
Essential to understanding any of Wilson’s dramas is the idea of
legacy. When the cycle is read chronologically from Gem of the
Ocean, to Fences at its center, on through Radio Golf, the question
of legacy or inheritance (cultural inheritance) is as prominent as
any of the characters in the work. Through their personas and
accompanying stories, or rather songs, all of Wilson’s characters
share their legacies with their peers and their audiences, and invite
them to evaluate their worth and meaning.
In Fences, the legacies offered are not all favorable. Troy offers and
passes down a legacy of responsibility but not of love, of selfishness
instead of selflessness, and of strength and perseverance instead of
cowardice. Like the blues song ‘Old Blue’ that Cory and Raynell
heard Troy sing during his lifetime, and that they perform as a duet
on the day of Troy’s funeral, Troy’s legacy has been passed on, espe-
cially to Cory. However, just as the essence of an undocumented
oral text may remain the same while the words change, Cory and
Raynell will have the opportunity to examine their father’s legacy,
forgive him for its flaws, and build a newer and sin-less legacy. Wilson’s
prologue and Rose’s words to Cory, fittingly, frame Fences’s plot and
enclose a story about love, patience, and most of all forgiveness.
The Wilsonian character

Lastly, any actor who has the opportunity to workshop an August
Wilson play should heed the words of Wilsonian actor Charles
Dutton. Twice I have heard Mr Dutton explain to audiences that
every actor and every black actor cannot be a Wilsonian actor
(Dutton, Charles, 2005 and 2007). Wilson’s words are powerful
and they motivate the plot and the characterizations and the actions
of the play. Any actor who cannot embrace and respect the long
story monologues and the survivalist perspectives of Wilson’s char-
acters need not attempt Wilson’s work.
Hence, this last exercise asks that each actor attempt to locate
and/or create the Wilsonian character within himself. As they study
and memorize the drama’s lines, they should be ever mindful of
Wilson’s characters’ histories and experiences. Simply, place yourself,
if you are willing, into the complexities of a culture and its people
who have endured despite enslavement, disenfranchisement and
segregation and learn from their strength. Finally, remember that
the Wilsonian character is not a victim.
5 Conclusion
Fences is a wonderfully sound, African-American centered, universal

drama peopled with extraordinary characters and motivated by a
specific plot that vacillates between past legacies and future legacies;
it is a drama that will find itself produced and studied well into the
twenty-first century. Numerous productions and revivals of this
seminal work continue to appear on American stages, thus proving
the immortality of Wilson’s dramatic vision and its protagonist,
Troy Maxson.
The future of Fences is especially promising now that it has become
the ‘middle child’ of Wilson’s dramatic canon. Because Wilson com-
pleted the last play, Radio Golf, in his planned twentieth-century
cycle before his death, now the dramas are often organized and pre-
sented chronologically. Fences, set in 1957, finds itself in the center
of the cycle. This is a fitting position for the play because it is the
work that illustrates the changing tides of American social and
political structures, and the small victories that African Americans
have achieved since the Emancipation Proclamation, the Recon-
struction Period, and Jim Crow segregation policies. New productions
of the work, such as The Kennedy Center’s 2008 staged reading of
the drama and the anticipated Broadway revival of the work that
will be directed by Pulitzer Prize winning dramatist Suzan-Lori
Parks, alongside Wilson’s other plays, will now enable Fences to be
read and viewed as the fifth chapter of the dramatic novel or
fifth installment of Wilson’s century-long chronicle play. This type
of chronological staging of his works will afford audiences the
Conclusion 87
opportunity to trace the evolution of the African-American culture

through Wilson’s characters and note that, despite the changing
laws and tides, this culture and its people continue to fight for
equality and wholeness intra- and inter-culturally.
In classrooms, Wilson’s work is now moving from margin to
centre as more scholars are finding ways to incorporate his works
into departments outside of theatre, drama and literature. Students
in history and sociology departments are being introduced to Wil-
son’s plays as secondary sources (particularly Fences and Joe Turner’s
Come and Gone), so that they may develop a fuller understanding of
the effects of racial discrimination on African Americans. These
same disciplines also utilize Wilson’s plays to further their teachings
on African-American cultural motifs, especially the vernacular
genres blues, folklore and storytelling. Thus Wilson’s Fences is con-
tinuing to solidify its presence in academic circles and forging an
interdisciplinary ground for study.
Presently, Fences’s film adaptation has been delayed because of
Paramount Picture’s failure to meet Wilson’s directorial terms, and
I am not certain if this conflict will ever be resolved. However, if the
Wilson estate and Paramount reach an agreement, this production
will enable Wilson’s Fences, like The Piano Lesson, to not only reach
(and re-reach) numerous and diverse audiences, but it will also
allow another great dramatic work to be immortalized beyond the
page and stage. Moreover, this production may set the stage for
more Wilsonian film adaptations to be made.
I would like to imagine a few future productions that could take
the reception of Fences to new audiences and provoke new insights.
Fences could be staged alongside its twin, Death of a Salesman. This
type of coupled production of two of the most important American
dramatic works of the twentieth century would enable actors and
directors the opportunity to stretch their dramatic abilities from
Milleresque to Wilsonian moments (or vice versa) and provide crit-
ics and scholars an opportunity continue to discuss the connections

between these two American dramatists and their works.
Fences illustrates Troy Maxson’s Northern and pre-Civil Rights
Movement demand for equality within the sanitation industry. In
1968, 3 years after Fences’s conclusion and Troy’s demise, sanitation
employees in Memphis, Tennessee, embarked on their own a strike
protesting the accidental deaths of two of their fellow workers. This
strike brought Martin Luther King, Jr to the city twice, where dur-
ing his last visit he delivered the famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech
and was assassinated by a sniper’s bullet. Because the sanitation
workers and their representative slogan ‘I Am a Man’ echoes Fences’s
theme of Civil Rights and equality, this drama could be staged in
Memphis, Tennessee, as part of the yearly commemoration of this
event. I contend that a Memphis production would further elevate
the Civil Rights characteristics dramatized in the play and prove
that both Northern and Southern African Americans face(d) the
same types of discrimination.
Lastly, Fences is a multilayered historical work that not only
embodies the tenets of the Civil Rights movement, but it also per-
sonifies the great American sport, baseball. A future production of
Fences could be staged on a baseball field, with the Maxson’s home
and yard centered within the baseball diamond. Baseball is Troy’s
metaphorical mission statement and life’s philosophy; hence, I sug-
gest that the metaphor be moved to the center of a production and
used to further complicate the lives of an African-American every-
man, and those of his family and friends, who must learn to interpret
his language – baseball, strikes, steals, outs – so that they may
understand his base, his life. The purposes of a fence around a base-
ball diamond are to keep those persons outside of the stadium safe
from the ball and away from the action of the game, and to allow
for proof of a home run. The purposes of Fences, the drama, are to
offer a glance into African-American culture in the 1950s, prove
that black life is human life, demonstrate Wilson’s ability to write
Conclusion 89
a structured, single-character focused drama, and most importantly,

protect and preserve the integrity of black life, family, love and cul-
ture. Wilson’s Fences reminds us that from a coal a diamond is formed;
from the baseball diamond, Troy preaches his philosophical view.
Fences has numerous staging possibilities for the future. Now
that the Wilsonian cycle of dramas is complete, directors and actors
will conceive of new ways to link the works and the characters into
entities that flow easily from one to another. Scholars and teachers
will identify new pedagogical strategies through which to introduce
Wilson to the next generations of Wilsonian actors, directors,
scholars and teachers. In sum, any and each new production of
Wilson’s dramas will enable his work to cement his position within
the American theatre as one of our greatest playwrights.
Timeline 1950–65
Year Politics Culture
1950 The United States According to the U.S. Census,

entered the Korean War; approximately 1.6 million
The U.S. Supreme Court African Americans had migrated
ruled that dining cars on from Southern states to
interstate trains could not be Northern states; Gwendolyn
segregated; Ralph Bunche Brooks became the first African-
wins the Nobel Peace Prize American author to win a
for his service as a U.N. Pulitzer Prize; Juanita Hall
mediator in Palestine became the first African
American to win a Tony award;
Jackie Robinson became the first
African American to appear on
the cover of Life magazine;
Pittsburgh, PA had a population
of 676,806; the Hill District
(August Wilson’s home and
Fences’ setting) had a population
of 20,813
1951 The U.S. Army disbanded Roy Campanella was named the
the twenty-fourth Infantry National League’s Most Valuable
Regiment unit Player
1952 The United States detonated Invisible Man, written by Ralph

the first Hydrogen Bomb at Ellison, was published
Eniwetok Atoll, located in
the Pacific Ocean; for the
first time in 71 years no

known lynchings had taken
in the United States; Dwight
D. Eisenhower was elected
to his first term as President
of the United States
1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower was Ellison’s Invisible Man won the

sworn in as the thirty-fourth National Book Award; Watson
President of the United and Crick published their
States; The Korean War discovery of DNA (April); Louis
officially ended on 27 July Peterson’s Take a Giant Step
1953 opened on Broadway; Larry
Doby became the first African-
American player in the American
League when he signed with the
Cleveland (Ohio) Indians
1954 The Brown vs. the Topeka The New York Giants’ Willie
Board of Education case Mays was awarded the National
resulted in the U.S. Supreme League’s Most Valuable Player
Court’s decision to ban title; Dorothy Dandridge starred
segregation in public schools in Otto Preminger’s Carmen
Jones
1955 The U.S. Interstate Montgomery, Alabama Bus

Commerce Commission Boycott begins following Rosa
banned segregation in Parks’s refusal to give up her seat
Interstate travel facilities; at the front of the bus; 14-year-
The U.S. Supreme Court old Emmet Till was murdered
ordered all United States
schools to begin
desegregation plans
1956 President Dwight D. Singer Nat ‘King’ Cole became

Eisenhower was elected to the first African American to
his second term as President host a television variety show
of the United States: The U.S.

Supreme Court ruled that
Montgomery, Alabama’s bus
segregation as
unconstitutional
1957 The Civil Rights Act of 1957 Tennis player Althea Gibson was
was passed to protect the first African-American tennis
African-American voting champion at Wimbledon;
rights; the Little Rock Nine, Langston Hughes’s Simply
under the protection of U.S. Heaven opened on Broadway;
Federal Troops, integrated Baseball player Hank Aaron was
Little Rock, Arkansas’ named the National League’s
Central High School; Most Valuable Player
Ghana, West Africa became
the first African nation
to be decolonized
1958 Clifford R. Wharton, Sr NASA, the North American

became the first African Space Agency, was formed;
American to head an Baseball player Ernie Banks
American Embassy in was named the National
Europe. He became the League’s Most Valuable
minister to Romania Player; dancer Alvin Ailey
founded the Alvin Ailey
American Dance Theater
1959 Alaska became the forty- Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in

ninth state; Hawaii became the Sun opened on Broadway.
the fiftieth state The play ran for 538
performances; Miles Davis
released ‘Kind of Blue’; Motown
Records was founded in Detroit,
Michigan by Barry Gordy; Jazz
singer Ella Fitzgerald and band
leader Count Basie became the
first African Americans to win
Grammy Awards
1960 The Civil Rights Act of 1957 Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird
was strengthened by the Civil was published
Rights Act of 1960 that was
signed into law by President
Eisenhower. This Act held the
government more responsible
when reviewing civil rights
violations; The first televised
American Presidential debate
took place (John F. Kennedy
and Richard M. Nixon)
1961 John F. Kennedy became the Kennedy established the Peace

thirty-fifth President of the Corps; Alan Shepard became the
United States; The U.S. first American to travel into
ended diplomatic relations space; Ossie Davis’s play Purlie
with Fidel Castro-led Cuba Victorious, opened on Broadway
and supported the Bay of
Pigs invasion
1962 The United States Jackie Robinson became the first

government banned African American to be inducted
discrimination in public into the Baseball Hall of Fame;
housing the Negro Baseball League
became defunct following the
integration of American baseball
1963 Following the assassination President John F. Kennedy was

of President John F. assassinated on 28 March 1963;
Kennedy, Lyndon B. over 250,000 people participated in
Johnson became the the March in Washington; Rev.
thirty-sixth President of Martin Luther King, Jr delivered his
the United States on seminal ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at
22 November 1963 the March in Washington; Sidney
Poitier won the Oscar for Best
Actor; Civil Rights Activist Medgar
Evers was assassinated
1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Dr Martin Luther King, Jr

was passed. This Act banned received the Nobel Peace; Cassius
discrimination in public Clay (Muhammad Ali) won the
accommodations, Heavyweight Boxing
employment and education; Championship: Lorraine
Lyndon B. Johnson was Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney
elected President of the Brustein’s Window opened on
United States; The twenty- Broadway
fourth Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution abolished
a poll tax that was
implemented to prevent
Southern African Americans
from voting
1965 The United States Congress Malcolm X was assassinated;

passed the Voting Rights Act Satchel Paige was named the
of 1965; The United States National Baseball Congress’
entered the Vietnam War; All-time Outstanding Player;
Thurgood Marshall was James Baldwin’s The Amen
appointed solicitor general Corner opened on Broadway
of the United States
Supreme Court; Patricia R.
Harris became the first
African-American woman to
be appointed a U.S.
Ambassador (She was the
Ambassador to Luxemburg.)
Further Reading
The play
August Wilson, Fences, in August Wilson: Three Plays, Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985 and 1991. The first edition
of this play was published one year after its original Broadway
opening. This edition is the final version of the drama as it was
presented on Broadway.
The playwright
Bigsby, Christopher (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to August
Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. This
collection of essays examines Wilson’s life and career, his rela-
tionship to black theatre and the critical reception of his work,
as well as including chapter-length studies of each play of his
ten-play cycle by prominent Wilsonian scholars.
Bryer, Jackson R. and Mary C. Hartig, Conversations with August
Wilson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
The most definitive collection of Wilson’s interviews from the
beginning of his career in the 1980s up through the twenty-
first century, this text enables Wilson scholars to read his per-
spectives first-hand.
Wilson, August, The Ground on Which I Stand, New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1996 and 2001. Offers an enlighten-
ing representation of Wilson’s cultural-politics, his pride and
96 Further Reading
allegiance to the African-American culture, and a call for all

American theatre practitioners to work ‘together’ to create the-
atre spaces where all persons and cultures will be acknowledged
and supported on their ‘own ground’, but also as part of Amer-
ican theatre.
Wilson, August, A Conversation with August Wilson, Producer and
director Matteo Bellinelli; producer, Larry Adelman; writer
Barbara Christian, San Francisco, CA: California News Reel,
1992. Using a montage of excerpts from Wilson’s staged pro-
ductions and photos and film footage from African-American
history, this filmed interview introduces Wilson scholars to
Wilson by way of his own words. In this interview, Wilson
explains his Hill District youth, the influence of the blues on
his work, and his concept of the ‘blood’s memory’, that form
of memory that is innate and that connects him and his char-
acters with the memories and actions of their African and
African-American pasts.
Wilson, August, August Wilson: Writing and the Blues, producer,
Public Affairs Television, Inc., Princeton, NJ: Films for the
Humanities, 1994. In this interview with Bill Moyers, Wilson
walks through the Hill District and further explains his musical
muse – the blues – and how Bessie Smith’s ‘Nobody Can Bake
a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine’ moved him and made him recog-
nize a ‘nobility’ in the black voices that he heard growing up in
the Pittsburgh Hill District. Wilson also discusses how his
works are ways to enable African-American audiences to recon-
nect and recognize their Africanness.
The cultural context

Clark, Keith, Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines,
and August Wilson, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
A compelling discussion of representations of black manhood
Further Reading 97
and masculinity, of particular interest to Wilson scholars is the

chapter ‘Race, Ritual, Reconnection, Reclamation: August
Wilson and the Refiguration of the Male Dramatic Subject’,
which examines the manner in which Wilson constructs his
African-American male characters ‘to convey the multifaceted
nature of post-1960s black male dramatic subjectivity’ (101).
Hay, Samuel, African–American Theatre: An Historical and Critical
Analysis, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Offers a comprehensive overview of the development of
African-American theatre from its beginnings up though the
end of the twentieth century, including an important reading
of Wilson’s dramatic canon and its placement within the
African-American theatrical continuum.
Lanctot, Neil, Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black
Institution, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2004. An in-depth study of the history of the American Negro
League Baseball organization and its players, including impor-
tant information about the cultural and economic responses
that this league elicited.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen, August Wilson: A Literary Companion, North
Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., 2004. Snodgrass offers
an encyclopedia-styled explanation of August Wilson’s plays,
characters, settings, language and significant literary, sociologi-
cal and historical terms used in scholarly and journalistic
discussions of Wilson’s works. This text also includes a detailed
chronology of August Wilson’s life and works from his birth in
1945 on through April 2005, and a genealogy chart of Wilson’s
family from his maternal grandmother to his daughter, Azula
Carmen Wilson.
Williams, Dana and Sandra Shannon, August Wilson and Black
Aesthetics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. A collection
of essays and interviews that explore the black aesthetic as
presented in the works of August Wilson, including Harry
98 Further Reading
Elam Jr’s ‘August Wilson and Hip Hop’ and Yolanda Williams
Page’s interview with Wilsonian actor Charles Dutton. This
collection concludes with an insightful interview in which
Wilson discusses his perspective on aesthetics.
Schwartzman, Myron, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art, New York:
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990. This compilation of Bearden’s
work, with a preface authored by August Wilson, visually and
textually presents the works of Wilson’s visual muse for Fences,
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson.
Shannon, Sandra, August Wilson’s Fences: A Reference Guide, Con-
necticut: Greenwood Press, 2003. The most definitive cultural
and critical discussion of Fences as both a singular American
classic and part of Wilson’s ten-play cycle series, with informa-
tive material about Wilson’s dramatic influences (especially
artistic influences) and critical reception.
Websites
As of November 2007, when the words ‘August Wilson’s Fences’
were typed into the www.google.com search engine, 620,000 sites
appeared identifying everything from biographical timelines and
interviews with Wilson and Wilsonian actors, to photos and play-
bills of productions of Fences. Hence, Wilson’s legacy has been glo-
balized by the World Wide Web. What follows are a few websites
that offer specific information about Wilson and Fences.
‘August Wilson’, http://encarta.msn.com/media_461519498/

August_Wilson.html. This site provides an excerpt from Fences,
a photo of Wilson, and an audio file of Wilson reading Troy’s dis-
cussion of death.
Ben Calvert and Nadine Warner, ‘Study Guide for Court Theatre’s
Production of August Wilson’s Fences’. http://www.courttheatre.org/
Further Reading 99
home/plays/0506/Fences/studyguide/FencesStudyGuide.pdf. This site

offers a definitive exploration of Fences, beginning with Wilson’s
obituary and concluding with pre- and post-production topics and
discussion questions.
‘Fences’, http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/Fences/. Spark notes

offers a detailed discussion of the play’s themes, characters, motifs
and key facts. A quiz is also included.
‘Fences’, http://www.webenglishteacher.com/awilson.html. This site

offers teachers and students lesson plans and assignments to use
when teaching Fences and The Piano Lesson.
Portland Center Stage director Jonathan Wilson and cast, ‘Fences by

August Wilson’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1qov8jlkXQ.
Members of the Portland Center Stage’s production of Fences offer
their insights on Fences and on portraying its various characters.
This site provides wonderful insight that will supplement Chapter 4.
References
Note: All references to the play are to the 1985 edition of Fences
found in August Wilson: Three Plays. Pittsburgh: University of Pitts-
burgh Press, 1991.
Awkward, Michael (1994), ‘“The Crookeds with the Straights”:
Fences, Race, and the Politics of Adaptation’, in Alan Nadel (ed.),
May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August
Wilson (pp. 205–29). Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Bennetts, Leslie (1987), ‘For Mary Alice, “Fences” Has a Universal
Theme’, 30 March 1987, The New York Times available at www.
nytimes.com.
Blumenthal, Anna (2000), ‘More Stories Than the Devil Go Sinners:
Troy’s Stories in August Wilson’s Fences’. American Drama
Vol. 9, Issue 2 (Spring): 74–96.
Booker, Margaret (1997), ‘Building Fences in Beijing’. American
Theatre (May/June): 50–52.
Cowan, Tom and Jack Maguire (1994), Timelines of African-
American History: 500 Years of Black Achievement (pp. 215–51).
New York: Perigee Books.
Creamer, Robert W. (1987), Rev. of ‘Fences’. Sports Illustrated,
New York, 8 June 1987: 12–13.
Disch, Thomas (1987), ‘Rev. of Fences’. Nation, 18 April 1987:
516–17.
Dutton, Charles (2005 and 2007), Post-performance Discussion(s),
Conference notes taken at the Conference ‘Situating August
Wilson in the Canon and the Curriculum’ Two Day Symposium
(8–9 April 2005) organized by Dr Sandra Shannon at Washington,
References 101
DC; and at Conference ‘An August Wilson Celebration’

at Rhodes College, (19–22 September 2007) organized by
Rhodes College, Hattiloo Theatre, Memphis, TN; and The
University of Memphis Performance, 19 September 2007,
Memphis, TN.
Elam, Harry J. (2004), The Past as Present in the Drama of August
Wilson. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
Ellison, Ralph (1964), Shadow and Act. New York: Random House.
Evans, Everett (2002), ‘“Fences” role liberating actor says’. The
Houston Chronicle (Houston, Texas), 17 February 2002: 11.
Gerard, Jeremy (1987), ‘Waterford to Broadway: Well-traveled
“Fences”’, The New York Times, 9 April 1987, available at www.
newyorktimes.com.
Gittleson, Gia (2006), ‘Angela Bassett (dialogue with Angela Basset)’.
Los Angeles Magazine Vol. 51, Issue 9 (September): 230.
Greenberg, James (1991). ‘Did Hollywood Sit on Fences?’ The New
York Times, 27 January 1991, available at www.nytimes.com.
Henry, William III (1987), ‘Fences’. Time 129 (6 April 1987): 81.
Herrington, Joan (1998), I Ain’t Sorry for Nothin’ I Done: August
Wilson’s Playwrighting Process. New York: Limelight.
Hughes, Langston (1925, 1959), ‘I, Too, Am American’, in Nellie
McKay and Henry L. Gates, Jr (eds), The Norton Anthology
of African-American Literature (Second edition) (P. 1295).
New York: Norton, 2004.
Jones, James Earl (2001), ‘Playwright: August Wilson’. Time 9 July
2001: 84.
Locke, Alain (1925), ‘The New Negro’, in Nellie McKay and Henry
L. Gates, Jr (eds), The Norton Anthology of African-American
Literature (pp. 960–70). New York: Norton, 2004.
Lyons, Bonnie (1997), ‘An Interview with August Wilson’, in
Jackson Bryer and Mary Hartig (eds), Conversations with
August Wilson (pp. 204–22). Mississippi: The University Press
of Mississippi, 2006.
102 References
McDonough, Carla J. (1997), ‘August Wilson: Performing Black

Masculinity’, Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contempo-
rary American Drama (pp. 133–59). North Carolina: McFarland
& Company, Inc.
Menson-Furr, L. (2005), ‘Conference notes’, taken at the Confer-
ence ‘Situating August Wilson in the Canon and the Curriculum’
two day symposium (8–9 April 2005) organized by Dr Sandra
Shannon at Howard University, Washington, DC.
Moyers, Bill (1988), ‘August Wilson: Playwright’, in Jackson
Bryer and Mary Hartig (eds), Conversations with August Wilson
(pp. 61–80). Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi,
2006.
Mulekwa, Charles (2005). www.earthtimes.org.
Nadel, Alan (1994), ‘Boundaries, Logistics, and Identity: The
Property of Metaphor in Fences and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone’,
in Alan Nadel (ed.), May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on
the Drama of August Wilson (pp. 86–104). Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press.
Novice, Kevin, (2006), ‘A Landmark Event in the American The-
atre: Playhouse Announces Casting for Fences Revival’, 7 July
2006 (press release): 1–2. www.pasadenaplayhouse.org.
Pereira, Kim (1995), ‘Fences: The Sins of the Father . . .’, August
Wilson and the African-American Odyssey (pp. 35–53). Illinois:
The University of Illinois Press.
Pettengill, Richard (1993), ‘The Historical Perspective: An Interview
with August Wilson’, Jackson Bryer and Mary Hartig (eds),
Conversations with August Wilson (pp. 155–71). Mississippi: The
University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance (1977), Pittsburgh Neighborhood
Atlas: The Hill. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance.
Plimpton, George and Bonnie Lyons (1999), ‘The Art of Theater:
August Wilson’. The Paris Review, Vol. 41, no. 153: 1–28.
References 103
Rich, Frank (1985), ‘Wilson’s “Fences”’. New York Times 7 May

1985 (Tuesday). www.nytimes.com.
Richards, Lloyd (1985), ‘Introduction’ to Fences. New York: Plume
(Penguin Group) 1986.
Rosen, Carl (1996), ‘August Wilson: Bard of the Blues’, in Jackson
Bryer and Mary Hartig (eds), Conversations with August Wilson
(pp. 188–203). Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi,
2006.
Savran, David (1987), ‘August Wilson’, in Jackson Bryer and Mary
Hartig (eds), Conversations with August Wilson (pp. 19–37).
Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Shannon, Sandra (1991), ‘August Wilson Explains His Dramatic
Vision: An Interview’, in Jackson Bryer and Mary Hartig (eds.)
Conversations with August Wilson (pp. 118–54). Mississippi:
The University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Shannon, Sandra (1993), ‘“Blues, History, and Dramaturgy”: An
Interview with August Wilson’. African-American Review Vol. 27,
No. 4: 539–59.
Shannon, Sandra (1995), ‘Developing Character: Fences’, The
Dramatic Vision of August Wilson (pp. 89–117). Washington,
DC: Howard University Press.
Shaw, Marc E. (2007), ‘Fences’, in Theatre Journal Vol. 59, Issue (2):
282–84.
Simonson, Robert (2005), ‘Sail Away: Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean
Ends Brief Broadway Run February 6’ www.playbill.com 6 Feb-
ruary 2005.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen, (2004), August Wilson: A Literary Companion,
North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc.
‘Stage View: The Year’s Best; Engaged Drama Treated Real Concerns’.
The New York Times, 27 December 1987. www.nytimes.com.
Staples, Brent (1987), ‘Fences: No Barrier to Emotion’. The New
York Times, 5 April 1987. www.nytimes.com.
104 References
Verini, Robert (2006), ‘Fences stands tall in evocative revival’,

Variety Vol. 404, Issue 4 (September 11): 61.
Watlington, Dennis, (1989), ‘Hurdling Fences’, in Jackson Bryer and
Mary Hartig (eds), Conversations with August Wilson (pp. 81–89).
Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
Werner, Craig (1994), ‘August Wilson’s Burden: The Function of
Neoclassical Jazz’, in Alan Nadel (ed.), May All Your Fences Have
Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (pp. 21–50). Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press.
Williams, Dana and Sandra Shannon (2004), ‘A Conversation with
August Wilson’, August Wilson and Black Aesthetics (pp. 187–95).
New York: Palgrave.
Wilson, August (1985), Fences, in August Wilson Three Plays
(pp. 95–192). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991.
Wilson, August (1990), Foreword, in Myron Schwartzman’s Romare
Bearden: His Life and Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Wilson, August (1992), Two Trains Running. New York: Plume,
1993.
Wilson, August (1994), ‘I Want a Black Director’, in Alan Nadel
(ed.) May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of
August Wilson (pp. 200–4). Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Wilson, August (1997), ‘The Ground on Which I Stand’. Callaloo
Vol. 20 No. 3 (Summer): 493–503.
Wolfe, Peter (1999), ‘Introduction: From Street to State’ and ‘The
House of Maxson’, August Wilson Stories (pp. 1–22 and 55–75).
New York: Twayne Publishers.
Index
A Raisin in the Sun 10 characters

Alice, Mary 2, 51, 74 Cory Maxson 29
Allegheny Repertory Theatre 7 workshop exercise 76–7
Awkward, Michael 46–7, 60 Gabriel Maxson 27–8
workshop exercise 77–8
Baldwin, James 34 Jim Bono 30–1
Baraka, Amiri 6, 32–3 workshop exercise 72–4
Bassett, Angela 53 Lyons Maxson 28
Bearden, Romare 7, 32 workshop exercise 75–6
Black Arts Movement 6 Raynell Maxson 29–30
Black Horizons Theatre 6 Rose Maxson 27
blues 5–6, 33–4 workshop exercise 74–5
Booker, Margaret 55–8 Troy Maxson 2, 26–7
Borges, Jorge Luis 14–15 workshop exercise 70–2
Bullins, Ed 32, 34, 69 film adaptation 58–62, 87
influences 31–4
Civil Rights Movement 64 key scenes
Act One 34–6
Dutton, Charles 4, 84 Act Two 36–40
workshop suggestions
Eisenhower, Dwight 8–9 80–3
Elam, Harry 29, 47–8 fathers and sons 80
Ellison, Ralph 34 friendship 82–3
Epps, Sheldon 53 marriage and
infidelity 80–2
Fences motifs 83–5
awards 2, 52 plot summary 17–26
106 Index
Fences (Cont’d) Fishburne, Laurence 53

productions Fugard, Arthol 6
Broadway 52–3
international 55–8 Goodman Theatre 2
Beijing, China 55–8 Great Migration 9, 10–11, 64
Ghana, West Africa 58
Uganda, Africa 58 Hallmark Hall of Fame 62
recent productions 53–5 Hansberry, Lorraine 2
Pasadena Playhouse 53 Harlem Renaissance 10
regional 51–2 Herrington, Joan 14–15, 31,
Goodman Theatre 45–6, 50
(Chicago) 51 Hill District 3–4
San Francisco 51 Hughes, Langston 5, 10
Seattle Repertory Theatre
(Seattle) 51 jazz 76
reviews and scholarly Jones, James Earl 2, 26, 51,
criticism 41–9 70–1
reviews
Creamer, Robert 43 Kennedy Center 54–5
Disch, Thomas 44
Henry, William 43 Leon, Kenny 16
Rich, Frank 41, 76
Staples, Brent 42–3 McClinton, Marion 16, 60
scholarly critiques Murphy, Eddie 59
Awkward, Michael 46–7
Blumenthal, Anna 49 Nadel, Alan 46
Herrington, Joan 45–4 ‘Nobody Can Bake a Sweet Jelly
McDonough, Carla 48 Roll Like Mine’ 65
Nadel, Alan 46
Shannon, Sandra 44–5 O’Neill National Playwright’s
Werner, Craig 47 Conference 7
Wolfe, Peter 49
setting Paramount Pictures 59
workshop exercise 79 Pasadena Playhouse 53–4
structure 50 Penny, Rob 6
Index 107
Pereira, Kim 45 ‘I Want a Black

Purdy, Claude 7 Director’ 59, 60
Jitney 15–16
Rashad, Phylicia 52 Joe Turner’s Come and
realism 34, 70 Gone 13–14
Richards, Lloyd 1, 2, 22 King Hedley II 16
Ma Rainey’s Black
Seattle Repertory Theatre 2 Bottom 3, 7–8, 13
Shannon, Sandra 44–5 The Piano Lesson 7, 14
Smith, Bessie 5 Radio Golf 16
spectacle characters 27–8, 77 Seven Guitars 14–15
Two Trains Running 7,
Vance, Courtney 51, 76 14
Verini, Robert 54 early plays
Black Bart and the Sacred
Wilson, August Hills 6
biography 3–8 The Homecoming 6
influences 5–7 Recycle 6
works Pittsburgh Cycle 11
discussions of specific plays (as twentieth-century
composed) cycle 12–16
‘The Ground on Which Winfrey, Oprah 60
I Stand’ (address) 32,
55, 4–6, 68 Yale Repertory Theatre 1, 51

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August Wilson’s

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls

David Mamet’s Oleanna

Patrick Marber’s Closer

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Sarah Kane’s Blasted

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America

© Ladrica Menson-Furr 2008

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1 Background and Context 1

Volumes in the series Continuum Modern Theatre Guides oﬀer

z Background and context

The aim is to provide accessible introductions to modern plays for

critical approaches and the intellectual debates that have illumi-

I would like to begin by thanking the series editors and Continuum

This chapter will serve as a preliminary introduction to the study of

Shakespeare’. After the production of this play at Yale, Chicago’s

If you pull Fences out, a more natural progression of my work

Thus, Fences began as a challenge, yet became the centerpiece of

About the play’s author

and on through the 1960s in search of the better jobs, educational

In 1965, as a twenty-year-old poet living in a rooming house

out on a continual search for ways to give expression to the

The musical genre of the blues is integral to understanding

greatly inﬂuenced by the blues and the nationalistic perspectives of

In 1977 . . . I discovered the art of Romare Bearden. My friend . . .

August Wilson’s playwriting talents continued to be honed dur-

From 1984 to 2005, August Wilson’s dramas and name rose

The social, economic and political context

country’ (www.whitehouse.gov). He ordered the complete desegre-

This group of Pittsburgh residents not only became the focus of

Wilson’s twentieth-century cycle

consciously and unconsciously, from both the African continent

blues to a wide theatre audience. Under the direction of Lloyd

the audience will be just intrigued with trying to . . . So then you

world at large. Like all of Wilson’s plays, King Hedley II is a tragedy

This chapter is a study of Fences both as a dramatic text and as a

Act One, Scene One

and live oﬀ of his woman. Beyond Troy’s storytelling, this scene

Act One, Scene Two

(and Rose’s) written in his book. When Rose instructs him to go

Act One, Scene Three

Cory will be exploited by the white-controlled sports industry.

Act One, Scene Four

Act Two, Scene One

Act Two, Scene Two

Act Two, Scene Three

up to this point in the drama overshadowed by Troy. Rose wins

Act Two, Scene Four

Act Two, Scene Five

as best as an illiterate, African-American man can in the early part

Gabriel Maxson is a Wilsonian spectacle character. Wilson explains