August Wilson’s FENCES @ Long Beach Playhouse

Fences is a puzzler. It’s easy to understand the play itself, a relatively straightforward domestic drama set within the context of huddled masses of Black people still struggling to be free a century after the eradication of slavery. What I don’t get is the hoopla, the accolades, the Pulitzer and Tony and Oscar, the renown this sixth installment of August Wilson’s 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle” would forever (so far) bring the playwright.

But let’s start with the facts. Fences opens in 1957 Pittsburgh, where Troy Maxson (Damon Rutledge) lives with wife Rose (Teri Gamble) and son Cory (Brandon Rachal). A former Negro leagues star who did 15 years in prison for murder, Troy’s hard childhood has made him a hard man—hard-working, hard-drinking, hard on his boy. And although he’s done his patriarchal duty, his modest life has proven ossifying, as he finally admits to Rose:

When I found you and Cory and a halfway decent job…I was safe. Couldn’t nothing touch me. I wasn’t gonna strike out no more. I wasn’t going back to the penitentiary. I wasn’t gonna lay in the street with a bottle of wine. I was safe. I had me a family. A job. I wasn’t gonna get that last strike. I was on first looking for one of them boys to knock me in. To get me home. […] It’s not easy for me to admit that I been standing in the same place for eighteen years.

While baseball is Troy’s go-to metaphor, Wilson’s is that eponymous fence. “Some people build fences to keep people out,” Troy’s BFF Bono (Rayshawn Chism) says as they stand in Troy’s yard looking at the fence-in-progress around it, “and other people build fences to keep people in.” Bono’s talking about Rose, but later Troy appropriates the symbol:

All right…Mr. Death. See now…I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna take and build me a fence around this yard. See? I’m gonna build me a fence around what belongs to me. And then I want you to stay on the other side. […] You stay on the other side of that fence until you ready for me.

The fences of Fences are figurative and literal, explicit and implicit; and although their metaphorical connotations may not be consistent, who says they have to be? A fence is a flexible symbol, and so Wilson can be forgiven for bending it to serve his need of the moment. What may be less forgivable are the passages—particularly a few tedious monologs—that contain the explicit use of metaphor. Wilson is strongest when writing naturalistic dialog, such as the Scene 1 chatter between Troy and Bono, which not only effectively establishes characters grounded in the real world but is entertaining in its own right. However, too often when Wilson is going for theme, he sacrifices his characters’ verisimilitude.

Writing aside, Fences success largely hinges on the casting of Troy. This is a big man who casts a huge shadow, and any actor taking on the role should project sufficient strength to dominate the action even when he is offstage. Rutledge probably half succeeds on this score. His energy is always projected at the right angles; I’m just not sure he’s able to generate quite enough force, particularly during Troy’s quieter moments.

The cast around Rutledge is similarly half-successful. Rachal does a nice job evincing instincts toward teenage rebellion that are largely stifled by his father’s mere will. But Gamble doesn’t muster enough modulation to make Rose believable. Her opening scenes are fine, but as the plot progresses, she never manages get into a different gear, and so her moment of crisis feels flat, with no time spent processing the Earth-shattering news she receives from Troy and little change in her delivery.

This should have been an easy adjustment for director Carl daSilva to make during rehearsals. What would have been a tougher fix is figuring out a way to make Wilson’s extremely uncreative character comings and goings feel less false. It’s all well and good now and then for pure coincidence to dictate one character’s exiting just seconds before another arrives, but when the coincidence is the main device for keeping certain characters apart as the plot demands it, it feels like the playwright just isn’t trying very hard. DaSilva did nothing to redress this textual shortcoming.

Other textual details reinforce that sense of a writer simply not putting in all the work he might have. An example that particularly irks me is an Act 1 discussion about baseball, where Cory launches into a digression about how Hank Aaron, who (Cory has just told us) hit his 42nd and 43rd home runs today, ain’t all that. “Hell, I can hit forty-three home runs right now!” he says.

CORY: Not off no major-league pitching, you couldn’t.
TROY: We had better pitching in the Negro leagues. I hit seven home runs off of Satchel Paige. You can’t get no better than that!
CORY: Sandy Koufax. He’s leading the league in strikeouts.

While a comparison between Paige, the Negro leagues’ all-time best, and Koufax was historically apt in 1985 (the year Fences debuted), in 1957 literally no-one on Earth—not even Koufax’s own mother—held Koufax in particularly high esteem. During that season (Cory’s reference to Aaron’s HR total makes clear that this scene takes place in September 1957), Koufax was a mediocre middle-reliever who wouldn’t crack the Dodgers’ starting rotation until the following season and was still four years away from being good enough for people to rank him among the best current pitchers, let alone among the best of all time. Plus, in 1957 he was never anywhere close to league the National League in strikeouts. (He finished ninth—a distant second on his own team to Don Drysdale!)

That overall lack of assiduousness leaves Fences pale in comparison—as a work of art, as a domestic drama, and as an evocation of the Black experience halfway through the 20th century—to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (which Long Beach Playhouse staged beautifully last year), to which Fences seems to owe a great debt. But perhaps because the literary establishment was more ready to reward a Black man in the mid 1980s than a Black woman in the late 1950s, Fences came out of the box with more momentum. And you know what they say about a body in motion.

Thus, Fences may be a better social barometer than a paragon of high art. That a lot of people think I’m wrong about the latter at least proves the former. Therefore, one way or the other, Fences does tell us something about the society we share.

FENCES LONG BEACH PLAYHOUSE • 5021 E ANAHEIM ST • LONG BEACH 90804 • 562.494.1014 LBPLAYHOUSE.ORG • FRI-SAT 8PM, SUN 2PM • $14–$24 • THROUGH JUNE 17

(Photo credit: Michael Hardy Photography)