Fences

1
Fences
35

• August Wilson
• (1945-2005)

2
Introduction

• Fences opened in Broadway on March 26, 1987, and
  ran for 525 performances, a remarkable run for a
  drama.
• The play starred James Earl Jones and was
  directed by Lloyd Richards, Dean of the Yale
  School of Drama (1979-1991) and the director of
  the original Broadway production of A Raisin in
  the Sun in 1959.
• In his New York Times review, Frank Rich wrote,
  Fences leaves no doubt that Mr. Wilson is a
  major writer, combining a poet's ear for
  vernacular with a robust sense of humor
  (political and sexual), a sure instinct for
  crackling dramatic incident and a passionate
  commitment to a great subject.
• In the New York Post, Clive Barnes stated, In
  many respects, Fences falls into the classic
  pattern of the American drama a family play,
  with a tragically doomed American father locked
  in conflict with his son. Greek tragedy with a
  Yankee accent.
• Fences won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the
  Drama Desk Award for Best New Play, the New York
  Drama Critics Circle Best Play, and the Tony
  Award for Best Play.

3
August Wilson

• August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, PA,
  in an impoverished section known as the Hill
  District. He was raised in a two-room apartment
  without hot water or a telephone. His German
  father abandoned him and his African-American
  mother and saw Wilson rarely.
• Wilsons mother remarried and moved to a white
  neighborhood where mother and son experienced
  much racism.
• Wilson stopped going to school at the age of
  fifteen when a teacher falsely accused him of
  plagiarizing a paper on Napoleon. A voracious
  reader, Wilson spent his days in the local
  library.
• As a young man he developed his love for the
  blues and different forms of African-American
  expression. He dedicated himself to becoming a
  writer by his late teens. In the 1970s, Wilson
  took the last name of his mother.

4
Wilson continued

• Frustrated by his lack of direction, his mother
  threw him out of the house. Wilson enlisted in
  the army, but spent only one year in active
  service before returning to Pittsburgh to live in
  a boarding house.
• He began writing poetry, but did not have much of
  an impact as a poet. But he said, After writing
  poetry for twenty-one years, I approach the play
  the same way. The mental process is poetic you
  use metaphor and condense.
• In 1969, Wilson, with playwright and teacher Rob
  Penny, founded Black Horizons on the Hill, a
  black activist theater company, which gave Wilson
  an opportunity to present his plays mostly in
  public schools and community centers.

5
Wilson continued

• In 1978 Wilson moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota,
  when he was invited to write plays for a black
  theater founded by Claude Purdy. His first
  significant play, Jitney, revealed promise, and
  would be reworked later for larger productions.
• In 1982, Wilson met Lloyd Richards, who offered
  to produce Wilsons work at Yale. At Yale,
  Wilson emerged as a major dramatist.
• Wilsons first play at Yale was Ma Rainey's Black
  Bottom, which opened to a successful Broadway run
  with Lloyd as director on October 11, 1984.
• With the opening of Fences on Broadway in 1987,
  Wilsons reputation soared.

6
Wilson continued

• Subsequent Broadway premieres and awards awaited
  him and his new plays. In 1990, he won his
  second Pulitzer for The Piano Lesson.
• In total, Wilson won two Pulitzer Prizes and
  seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and
  he has received twenty-three honorary degrees.
• Married three times, Wilson died of liver cancer
  in 2005.
• On October 16, 2005, fourteen days after Wilson's
  death, the Virginia Theatre on Broadway was
  renamed the August Wilson Theatre, the first
  Broadway house to be named after an African
  American.

7
The Pittsburgh Cycle

• Fences is a part of August Wilsons ten-play
  cycle that explores the African-American
  experience in the twentieth century.
• Im taking each decade and looking at one of the
  most important questions that blacks confronted
  in that decade and writing a play about it. Put
  them all together and you have a history.
• Collectively, the plays are known as the
  Pittsburgh Cycle ? all but one take place in the
  city's Hill District.

8
Pittsburgh Cycle continued

• Wilson completed the cycle, but the plays were
  not written in chronological order.
• 1900s ? Gem of the Ocean (2003)
• 1910s ? Joe Turners Come and Gone (1988)
• 1920s ? Ma Raineys Black Bottom (1985), set in
  Chicago
• 1930s ? The Piano Lesson (1990)
• 1940s ? Seven Guitars (1995)
• 1950s ? Fences (1987)
• 1960s ? Two Trains Running (1991)
• 1970s ? Jitney (1982)
• 1980s ? King Hedley II (1999)
• 1990s ? Radio Golf (2005)
• The Pittsburgh Cycle is recognized as one of the
  great achievements in the American theater.

9

• "He was a giant figure in American theater
  Heroic is not a word one uses often without
  embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright,
  but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind
  the creation of his body of work is really an
  epic story.

? Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America
10
Wilson as Dramatist

• Wilson said that his plays are influenced by the
  4 Bs the Blues fellow playwright and poet,
  Amiri Baraka author, Jorge Luis Borges, and
  painter, Romare Bearden.
• I see the blues as a book of literature and it
  influences everything I do. Blacks' cultural
  response to the world is contained in blues.
• From Baraka and plays like The Dutchman, Wilson
  was inspired to write directly and aggressively
  of the African-American experience.
• From the novelist Borges, Wilson was inspired to
  include elements of the fantastic or magical
  realism into his plays.
• Regarding Bearden, Wilson claimed, "When I saw
  his work, it was the first time that I had seen
  black life presented in all its richness, and I
  said, 'I want to do thatI want my plays to be
  the equal of his canvases.

11
Fences

• Wilsons ambitions extend far beyond simple
  storytelling. A mythmaker who sees his
  basically panorama-plays as stages in an
  allegorical history of black America, Wilson is
  also a folk ethnologist, collecting prototypical
  stories, testimonies, rituals of speech and
  behavior, which he embeds in his larger
  compositions. Buried deepest of all, under the
  dramatist Wilson, the mythmaker-cum-social
  historian Wilson, and the folklorist-ethnologist
  Wilson, is a tormented and complex ideologue
  Wilson, carrying on anguished debates with
  himself about such politically engrossing matters
  as black male-female relations, the use of black
  economic power, and the place of the church in
  the black community.
• ? Michael Feingold in The Village Voice,
  April 7, 1987

12

• My concern was the idea of missed
  possibilities. Music and sports were the
  traditional inroads for blacks, and in both Ma
  Rainey and Fences, with both Levee and Troy, even
  those inroads fail.
• August Wilson

13
Fences Opening Stage Directions

• The stage directions that introduce the play are
  lengthy and specific. Consider Wilsons
  description of the Maxson house strong with a
  sturdy porch in need of repair and
  maintenance ancient and badly in need of
  paint lacks congruence is of dubious
  value located off a small alley in a big-city
  neighborhood. These details suggest weariness,
  exclusion, frustration, and disappointment.
• Subsequent paragraphs contrast the European
  immigrant experience with that of the descendants
  of African slaves. By 1957, the time of the
  play, those early twentieth-century European
  immigrants were full participants in the American
  Dream and had contributed to making the 1950s a
  decade during which life seemed rich, full, and
  flourishing.

1957 World Series
14
Stage Directions continued

• On the surface, 1957 seemed so placid that
  the World Series might
• have been the most remarkable event of
  course, Wilsons
• mention of the Series also introduces the
  importance of baseball to
• the play. But as Wilson suggests, there
  was a strong undercurrent
• beneath those seemingly placid waters, one
  that would not remain
• submerged in the 1960s. Instead, this
  undercurrent, which flows
• through Troy Maxson, would make the next
  decade turbulent,
• racing, dangerous, and provocative.
• Wilson uses his elaborate stage directions
  to set the tone of his
• main characters lives and the tone of the
  play. The setting is filled
• with the weariness and frustration that
  follows broken dreams.

15
Troy Maxson

• Literally and figuratively, Troy is a large,
  powerful man. As his wife Rose says, when he
  walked through the house he was so big he filled
  it up, but he didnt always leave room for
  others.
• Troys first name suggests the legendary city of
  Troy (from Homers Iliad) and Fences is about
  the fall of Troy Maxson. His surname, Maxson, is
  an amalgamation of Mason and Dixon, i.e., the
  Mason-Dixon line, which separated the slave
  states from the free states. Troy was raised in
  the South, served a lengthy prison sentence, and
  lived subsequent years in the North.
• Troys life has been filled with hope and
  disappointment. He was an outstanding baseball
  player in prison, but his professional career was
  disappointing because of the color barrier in
  Major League Baseball. He confronts his boss to
  become a driver of the garbage truck, but is
  disappointed with being separated from his
  friends behind the truck.

16
Troy and Self-Mythologizing

• Much of Troys hope derives from his bolstering
  of himself and his low self-esteem through
  self-mythologizing.
• He draws on the Bible to recreate himself as a
  man of mythical or Biblical proportions. He
  tells of wrestling with Death, which recalls
  Jacobs wrestling with an angel. He fights off
  Death for three days and three nights as a
  result, he has learned to be ever vigilant.
• Troy wants to give himself grandeur, power, and a
  sense of immortality.
• He wants those around him to admire him the way
  fans once admired him.

17
Troy and Responsibility

• Troys values are rooted in his sense of
  responsibility. He carries out his
  responsibilities diligently and he expects others
  to fulfill their responsibilities to him. As he
  tells Cory, Mr. Rand dont give me my money come
  payday cause he likes me. He gives me cause he
  owe me.
• This emphasis on responsibility may work well for
  Troy in the workplace, but it fails him at home.
  Responsibility displaces love as the most
  important family value for Troy. Troy explains
  to Cory why he provides for him cause you my
  son. You my flesh and blood. Not cause I like
  you! Cause its my duty to take care of you. I
  owe a responsibility to you! ... I aint got to
  like you.
• Troys sense of responsibility is shortsighted as
  it costs him an opportunity to get close to his
  son.
• Troys emphasis on responsibility, which he
  defines in financial terms, allows for an
  extramarital affair.

18
Responsibility continued

• Although he loves his wife, he seems to feel
  little guilt over the affair. He never
  apologizes to Rose. He might feel justified
  because he turns over his paycheck to her and
  because Alberta offers him more laughter, joy,
  and veneration I can sit up in her house and
  laugh she firmed up my backbone, but I take
  my pay and give it to you. I dont have no money
  but what you give me back. I just want to have a
  little time to myself a little time to enjoy
  life.
• Troy may be fiscally responsible, but as a
  husband and father he is otherwise selfish,
  self-indulgent, hypocritical, and emotionally
  irresponsible.
• Consider Troys song, Old Blue. For Troy, Old
  Blue is about loyalty and the failure of human
  love. Only Troys dog Blue was there to awaken
  him after his fathers brutal beating. All of
  Troys human relationships beginning with his
  mothers abandonment of him have failed Troy.
  At the end, Cory and Raynell sing Old Blue to
  signal both their respect for and their
  forgiveness of their father.

19
Troy and Baseball

• Troy uses baseball as a metaphor throughout the
  play. Baseball not only gives his life
  direction, but it also gives him a vocabulary for
  self-expression. Although Troy may be
  illiterate, his use of baseball imagery is at
  times poetic and always expressive.
• He began life, he says, with two strikes against
  him, defines death as nothing but a fastball on
  the outside corner, and explains his affair as
  trying to steal second base after the frustration
  of standing on first base for so long. At that
  point, Rose is understandably frustrated by his
  baseball metaphors Were not talking about
  baseball! Were talking about you going off to
  lay in bed with another woman. Troy responds,
  Rose, youre not listening to me. Im trying
  the best I can to explain it to you. But Rose
  is insensitive to her husbands only means of
  articulation.

• Troy says he was born with two strikes against
  him. What are those two strikes? Poverty?
  Being African American in a racist culture?
  Being abandoned by his mother and being raised by
  an abusive father?

20
Rose

• Rose is committed to family and church. She
  tries to be an intermediary between father and
  son, explaining Cory to Troy in an effort to
  soften the father. She tries also to get Troy to
  see life more realistically. When he
  mythologizes his past, she corrects him or tells
  him to hush that talk.
• Rose is understandably disappointed and hurt by
  Troys affair, but her bitter response is
  destructive of not just Troy and their marriage,
  but herself as well From right now this child
  got a mother. But you a womanless man. Rose
  does not practice the Christian precept of
  forgiveness, and, as a result, she lives a lonely
  life.
• However, she passes on her understanding of her
  mistake and convinces Cory to be forgiving of
  Troy. See her lengthy speech near the very end
  of the play.
• Rose takes in Raynell not just out of sympathy
  and selflessness, but also because Raynell is the
  daughter that she always wanted but never had
  but I took on to Raynell like she was all them
  babies I had wanted and never had.

21
Rose continued

• Rose expresses the failure of her marriage in
  gardening terms of stunted plants and
  ungerminated seeds
• Troy, I took all my feelings, my wants and
  needs, my dreams and I buried them inside you.
  I planted a seed and watched and prayed over it.
  I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom.
  And it didnt take me no eighteen years to find
  out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasnt
  never gonna bloom.
• However, Rose does not rely on the gardening
  imagery as much as Troy relies on baseball
  imagery. Roses language is often unmetaphoric
  and direct.

22
Cory

• By the end of the play, Cory seems ready to
  embrace the higher values of his father and
  mother. He has demonstrated responsibility in
  the Marines after six years he has risen in rank
  to corporal, and, after his discussion with Rose,
  he has learned to forgive his father.
• The way for Cory to escape his fathers shadow,
  as Rose told him, is through forgiveness, not
  stubbornness, which staying away from the funeral
  would have indicated.
• Cory can move forward without the ghost of his
  father to haunt him.

23
Religion

• There are several references to the Bible, Jesus,
  and Roses church, all of which point out the
  strong role of Christianity in the
  African-American community.
• Troy is critical of Roses church and ministers.
  Rose is active in her church and when she bakes
  for the cake sale, Troy comments, All them
  preachers looking for somebody to fatten their
  pockets. Troy is obsessed with economics, so
  much so that he cuts himself off from the
  possibility of spiritual fulfillment as offered
  by the church.
• What other religious images and references appear
  in the play? What are their implications?

24
The Ending

• The most important religious symbol is Gabriel,
  especially his actions that close the play.
• The ending of Fences suggests that Wilson might
  not be pleased with those Christian churches who
  rely too completely on the white Christian
  tradition.
• Gabriel, who thinks himself the Archangel
  Gabriel, blows on his trumpet, but he is unable
  to open the gates of heaven for Troy. His
  failure leads him to a frightful realization,
  and he begins a dance of atavistic signature and
  ritual that opens heavens gate.
• Wilson might be suggesting that black churches,
  for spiritual wholeness, must consider their
  African roots in their rituals and spiritual
  experiences.

25
Title

• There are several fences to which the title can
  be said to allude
• The Fence Troy constructs in his backyard
  slowly he builds a fence that he finishes after
  Albertas death. This fence symbolizes Troys
  gradual alienation from his family, friends
  (Bono), and co-workers (as a driver he misses the
  camaraderie of those hauling the trash cans).
  His treatment of his sons, for instance, has led
  in time to his alienation from them.
• Baseball fences over which Troy hit so many
  home runs, suggests the color barrier in baseball
  that made it impossible for Troy to fulfill his
  athletic and financial potential.
• Institutional restrictions August Wilson said
  in an interview with David Savran in In Their Own
  Voices At the end of Fences every person, with
  the exception of Raynell, is institutionalized.
  Rose is in a church. Lyons is in a penitentiary.
  Gabriels in a mental hospital and Corys in the
  marines. The only free person is the girl,
  Troys daughter, the hope for the future. Rose
  finds refuge from the worlds bleakness behind
  the fence of her faith Jesus, be a fence
  around me every day.
• Fences constructed by white America in a
  general sense, all the barriers and hardships
  imposed on black Americans are fences constructed
  by white Americans to keep blacks marginalized.

26
Inscription

• Consider Wilsons inscription at the beginning of
  the play
• 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.
• How does this poem, written by August Wilson,
  affect your reading of the play? How is Fences a
  play largely about forgiveness? What sons in the
  play had to forgive fathers? Why? Who else
  needed to forgive? How does the ending reflect
  this theme?

27
For Further Consideration

• What does Fences say about the African-American
  experience in America? Cite details in the play
  to support your answer.
• Discuss Troys relationship with Bono. Why does
  Bono seek out Troy for his friend? Why does he
  stop being close to Troy?
• Discuss Troys refusal to allow Cory to accept a
  football scholarship to college. Wilson told
  David Savran in In Their Own Voices, that
  athletic scholarships are often exploitative.
  Athletes were not getting educated were taking
  courses in basketweaving. Some could barely
  read. Universities, he continued, made a lot
  of money off of athletes. Do you agree or
  disagree with Wilson and Troy? Is the situation
  better today than in 1957?

28
Further Consideration continued

• We see three generations of Maxson men in the
  play. How is each generation similar and
  different? Can we say that from Troys father to
  Cory, the Maxson man has progressed morally?
• Although Fences is a serious play, there is much
  humor (some sexual and some political). What did
  you find funny? Was any of the humor for
  satirical purposes?
• Compare Troy Maxson and Willy Loman (Death of a
  Salesman). Discuss their careers, their actions
  as fathers and husbands, their sense of pride,
  their alienation of family, their fathers
  influence on them, and their deaths and funerals.