George  Weinberg-Harter

San Diego Arts

August Wilson's "Fences" at Cygnet

By George  Weinberg-Harter
Posted on Jan 27 2008
Last updated Jan 30 2008

The deep, rich texture of August Wilson’s 1985 play "Fences" has been admirably captured by director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg and her excellent and vivid cast of players in Cygnet Theatre’s transfixing production. Since the playwright died, full of honors, some three years ago, appreciation of Wilson’s theatrical achievements (a cycle of ten plays epitomizing the African American experience decade by decade through the 20^th century) has continued to swell. Wilson’s dramatic mastery of character, language, incident, and background bid fair for him to enter the company of great playwrights. The powerful and flawed protagonist of "Fences," family patriarch Troy Maxson (Antonio "T.J." Johnson), echoes the tragic contradictions combined with magnetic sympathy of personality found in heros and villains (a distinction often blurry) of dramas from Shakespeare’s to O’Neill’s. But, lofty comparisons aside, Wilson will increasingly, I think, come to be esteemed for qualities that are recognizably and specifically Wilsonian (or Augustinian).

The outsize persona of Troy (in a portrayal as fine as or better than anything "T.J." Johnson has done during two notable decades on local stages) is that of an overbearing man who can take up all the space and suck out all the air in any room. By turns ebullient, bitter, or bullying, Troy feels a sort of personal sense of entitlement to do much as he pleases, founded upon and limited only by his claim to virtue based on his labor, his grim dedication to responsibility, his lumps taken, and his circumscribed triumph over adversity during his 53 years.

Troy’s life has been eventful and hard – leaving home at fourteen to escape his brutal sharecropper father; taking a wife and having a son, but then serving a fifteen year sentence in prison for murder during robbery; marrying a second time and fathering another son; serving in the army during the Second World War; pursuing a successful but difficult and low-paying baseball career in a Negro league. As the play opens in 1957, Troy is the owner of his own modest Pittsburgh home (its exterior beautifully and realistically shown in Mike Buckley’s detailed scenic design) and employed as a city trash collector on the verge of getting an unheard-of promotion (as a black man) to truck driver, thanks to the action of his labor union.

Thus does Wilson sketch a social background of general racial oppression and social disadvantage gradually being ameliorated by little inches of slow progress. Scant opportunities for advancement in his limited workplace have yielded Troy only small and tardy benefits. And the embittered Troy is now too old to gain any advantage from the eventual easing of color barriers in sports. As in his other plays, Wilson’s mode is to show moments in black history as general background (in this case, a society on the brink of civil rights changes) while focusing on a foreground composed of the personal lives and passions of a few very real people.

One of the fences of the title is the real one Troy is building around his yard. Other and symbolic fences are ones Troy has built in his life – to fence in his small circle of friends and family and to fence out the world (and, impossibly, death) – and a fence he seems to have constructed around his own hardened heart.

From the beginning and subsequently, we watch Troy, during a Friday afternoon frontyard drinking session, dominate his oldest friend Jim Bono (a subtle and delicate performance by Grandison M. Phelps III) and boast to Bono of the clandestine love affair Troy is carrying on behind his wife’s back with a much younger woman called Alberta. Troy seldom allows Bono very much chance to speak, sometimes appealing to him for back-up with others ("Bono’ll tell you that."), but then putting the words into his more modest friend’s mouth. There is a recollection here of the relationship between the boastful ‘Captain’ Doyle and his sidekick Joxer in Sean O’Casey’s "Juno and the Paycock" - with the difference that Bono though deferential is no sycophant, and in later scenes is seen to be delicately drifting away from the sphere of his increasingly difficult old chum.

Troy’s Juno-esque wife of eighteen years is the initially demure Rose (superbly played by Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson) who dutifully defers to him in most things, accepts his exaggerated inebriated Friday night romantic advances with a touch of flattered bewilderment, but firmly intercedes between Troy and his two sons, with whom Troy’s relationships are strained and unloving.

Lyons – Troy’s older son by his first wife – a jazz musician and something of a wastrel, is excellently played by Laurence Michael Brown with a loose, nervous, rhythmic animation that subsides in later scenes as life wears him down. Troy is irritated by Lyons’ inevitable brief appearances every payday seeking loans from his father. Troy, imprisoned during Lyons’ formative years, is reluctant to give his son anything (although Rose generously does), neither money nor affection – not even the least interest in or approval of his music, which Lyons continually and futilely seeks as well.

Troy’s relationship with his younger son Cory (touchingly portrayed by Patrick Kelly) is far more fraught. Troy outright refuses, even when Cory appeals for it, to demonstrate any spark of affection towards his son, whom he treats most brusquely. Troy claims that material support (up to a point) is all that fatherly duty demands. Moreover, Troy actively obstructs Cory’s highschool football career, which has attracted college recruiters. Terrible conflict ensues.

What seems to be Troy’s most truly tender (but still painful) kinship is with his brain-damaged brother Gabriel, played with great sympathy by Mark Christopher Lawrence. Injured in the war, Gabriel has become a kind of village idiot who lopes about the neighborhood with an unplayable trumpet suspended from a rope at his waist. (There may be a little hint of Harpo Marx here.) He suffers from delusions that he is the Archangel Gabriel. Troy has managed to finance his own home by using half of Gabriel’s VA benefits. He also bails out his brother whenever the authorities arrest Gabriel and want to pack him off to a mental hospital.

The drama’s climax comes when Troy informs his wife Rose that his hitherto secret girlfriend Alberta is about to bear him a child. As obtuse as any man who ever lived, Troy stupidly attempts to pathetically justify his appalling behavior, saying, "I just need some space is all. I just need some room to breathe." M’Lafi Thompson’s Rose then becomes magnificent, shedding her years of wifely submission in an instant of justified indignation – what one woman in the audience admiringly called her "Medea moment" (all the more magnificent for not involving any harm to the kids). Rose tells Troy what he might never have had to hear – that she had her needs in their marriage too, but had long deferred any hopes of achieving them when she had at last realized that the soil of her husband’s heart, in which she had planted her hopes, "was hard and rocky and was never going to bloom." (One may recall a climactic speech about the hardness of human hearts also spoken by O’Casey’s Juno.) Soon comes the shocking news that Alberta has died in childbirth; and Rose agrees to raise Alberta’s and Troy’s baby daughter as her own – while continuing to cohabit with him minus any further marital affection. (That daughter, Raynell, appears in a final scene, aged seven, charmingly portrayed by Madeline Hornbuckle.)

One of the shocking things about the news of Alberta’s death is the realization that it is occurring in the year 1957. As a close contemporary of Wilson, I recall that year well, and know that in my own privileged milieu the death of a mother during childbirth in a hospital was at that time all but unknown – something one would associate more with a previous century. But for blacks in that era (and sometimes today as well) medical treatment, even in a hospital, was considerably more haphazard than for whites. One may think of the negligent hospital death of Billie Holiday only two years later.

That final scene takes place on the day of Troy’s funeral in 1964. All his surviving family and friends are seen giving their final (if sometimes disaffected and even reluctant) tributes. The appearance of little Raynell suggests hopefully that Troy may finally have been able to connect emotionally with his last child. One of the heartening qualities of Wilson’s plays is the sense he creates of succeeding waves of real people moving on through history, and the survival of their spirit through time and change. One of the ways Wilson suggests that spiritual survival and succession is by people’s music, and that is done in "Fences" through the recurrence of certain songs – "Old Dog Blue" and "Please Mister Engineer" and "Hear It Ring" – that are used at emotional moments and which parents pass on to their children. Another of Wilson’s ways is through folkloric elements, often surprisingly presented in an integrated manner similar to the "Magical Realism" invented by Latin American authors. Such weird moments in "Fences" come when Troy – sometimes in jest, sometimes seriously – tells of his encounters with the devil, or challenges a personified Death (rather in the manner of Cyrano). And Troy’s sweetly deranged brother Gabriel, who talks of breakfasting with Saint Peter, fighting hellhounds, and awaiting his cue to sound the last trump, ends the play on just such an encouragingly fantastical note when (in his own mind) he trumpets Troy into heaven.

The production is beautifully lighted by Eric Lotze and convincingly costumed by Veronica Murphy.

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About the author: George Weinberg-Harter George Weinberg-Harter has been active in San Diego theatre since childhood, appearing in many local stage productions as well as doing graphic art for them. He has helped start theatre companies, authored and co-authored a number of plays produced locally and is a co-founder of the Fellow Calligraphers of San Diego. He is a member of the Actors Alliance of San Diego, the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle, and the San Diego Press Club, which has presented him with its 2007 First Place Excellence in Journalism Award for Drawing or Illustration.
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