The third play by an African American playwright to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, August Wilson's most widely known work won the award in 1987. In addition, it received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and a Tony Award for best play. Wilson developed the play over more than five years and through, as Joan Fishman discusses (“Developing His Song: August Wilson's Fences,” in August Wilson: A Casebook, 1994), more than five drafts. First read at New Dramatists in New York in 1982, the play was developed at the Eugene O'Neill Theater in the summer of 1983, produced at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1985, and taken on the road through productions in Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco. It opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theater on 26 March 1987. The cast featured James Earl Jones as Troy and Mary Alice as Rose.
The play centers on Troy Maxson and his family, who are posed at the dawn of the civil rights movement in 1959. An ex-con and a former player in the Negro Baseball League who feels racism crippled his athletic career, Troy now works as a garbage man. Convinced that his son Cory, a talented football player who has been promised a college scholarship, will only encounter similar racism, Troy prevents Cory from accepting the scholarship. Perhaps as a further repercussion of his experience of racism, Troy is unfaithful to his wife Rose and, when his girlfriend dies in childbirth, asks for Rose's help in rearing the child. Rose accepts Raynell, the child, but refuses to have any further conjugal relationship with Troy. After Troy's death, Raynell, Cory, and Rose acknowledge their love for this flawed man through the healing ritual of song.
Wilson wrote the play partly in response to conventional critics who had attacked Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) for its unconventional structure: he wanted to demonstrate that he could write a unified play that centered around a major character. But more importantly, he wanted to elucidate the indignities that African Americans suffered but hid from their children. As Fishman points out, the character of Troy seems loosely based upon Wilson's stepfather, David Bedford, who had also experienced disappointment in sports, a prison stay, a “new life” with Wilson's mother, and an early death. Brent Staples's review for the New York Times suggested that the play presents the life of many other African Americans as well.
The play's conventional husband-wife and fatherson conflicts are subservient to its discussion of racism. It illuminates the inherent inequity in America's treatment of African American males and the ways in which this racism becomes internalized and invades the most private of societal units—the family. The title offers the central metaphor for the play, reflecting the dual nature of those structures that people design for their protection but that also become their prisons.
A critical and commercial success, Fences broke the record for nonmusical plays when it grossed eleven million dollars in one year. Howard Kissel and Michael Feingold praised Wilson's poetic ability; Clive Barnes called it the strongest American writing since that of Tennessee Williams. The play is generally considered to stand alongside the work of Henry Miller for its insightful portrayal of the problematics of the American dream.
[See Piano Lesson, The.]
Marilyn Elkins
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
