Electric ‘Fences’

It’s artistry, not luck, that has turned August Wilson’s cycle of dramas on the black experience in America into some of the richest and most expressive theater of his time.

His contributions include Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson and Fences, now at the Arden Theatre.

Fences leaves no doubt that Wilson is a major writer, combining a poet’s ear for vernacular with a robust sense of humor (both political and sexual), a sure instinct for crackling drama and a passionate commitment to an engrossing subject.

Using characters that speak with rolling, fluid rhythms, he accurately and purposefully records black speech and life. Fences is full of rich idioms and funny lines.

Another impressive quality of Wilson’s play is that it is not a polemical piece. Because the play is set in the late 1950s, just before the civil-rights movement exploded, racial discrimination is very much a part of the fabric, affecting the situation of every character. As important as it is, however, that is not the main focus. Instead, Fences hones in on the universal quality of the people.

A work of exceptional depth, eloquence and power, Fences is a major addition to the decade-by-decade cycle of plays – beginning with the prizewinning Black Bottom – through which Wilson is surveying the black American experience in the 20th century.

Fences‘ main character, Troy Maxson, is a garbage collector who takes great pride in keeping his family together and providing for them. Troy’s rebellion and frustration set the tone for the play as he struggles for fairness in a society that seems to offer none. In his struggle, he builds fences between himself and his family. Troy also wrestles with the idea of death and claims that he sees death as nothing but a fastball, something he can handle.

In the old days of the Negro Leagues, Troy had a big home-run swing, hitting the ball far beyond the fences of now-forgotten stadiums. Now a 53-year-old sanitation worker, his body gone to paunch, he finds fences hemming him in instead of challenging him. But he’s still gutsy and expansive, a man who can brag about wrestling with death and make you see it as a struggle between equals.

In many respects, Fences falls into the classic pattern of the American realistic drama: a family play with a tragically doomed father locked in conflict with his son. The fence in the title refers specifically to a picket fence Troy is building around the backyard at his wife Rose’s request. But symbolically it refers to the many fences in the lives of the characters: those that people want to escape from as well as those they build around others.

Troy’s house is dilapidated, but he has a good friend in Jim Bono and a peerless wife in Rose. At the end of a day’s work, the two men engage in the swaggering talk that we would expect. And the fact that the real strength and common sense in the family reside in Rose is also no surprise.

Troy’s eldest son by a previous marriage, Lyons, is an irresponsible musician who visits when he needs to borrow money. Troy’s brother, Gabriel, suffered a head wound in World War II and is harmlessly crazy but crazy nonetheless. Cory, Troy’s son by Rose, is modest. He also is a talented athlete and has been offered a football scholarship in South Carolina.

This would seem to be a triumph to make his father proud, but Troy is so embittered by his own shabby treatment in professional sports and so certain that black players will never be treated fairly that he refuses to agree to Cory’s recruitment, insisting instead that he continue his measly job at the A&P; grocery store.

The other thread in the plot is Troy’s involvement with a younger woman, which leads to the birth of his third child, a girl. When the woman dies in childbirth, Rose takes the baby in to raise as her own.

A man of great humor with an emotional appetite for life, Troy takes on everyone, including God and death (he holds lengthy, personal conversations with both). Along with his zest for living and his appeal, however, Troy is exceedingly selfish toward those around him, not only Rose and Cory, but his brother, whom he has taken advantage of financially. In short, Troy is a complex character and part of Wilson’s strength as a dramatist is that he shows the man whole, with the full measure of his shortcomings as well as his strengths.

Wilson’s writing clearly delineates this family as a compelling collection of characters. He uses a fresh, loose-limbed structure that is full of storytelling. Unfortunately, most of the drawn-out plot turns are achingly melodramatic. One wishes for less talk and more action.

As Troy, Ernest Perry seems saddled with rather than riding confidently this role of a lifetime. Nowhere near the imposing figure James Earl Jones created on Broadway, Perry fails to match the heavy demands of a role that is a classic in its emotional compass. Troy’s many moods extend from reflective muse and high good humor to bullying sarcasm and explosive rage, but Perry’s performance simply doesn’t explain Troy’s commanding appeal.

The rest of the cast is a mix, with a muddled interpretation of Rose by actress Stephanie Berry and a forceful rendering of Cory by Bowman Wright. Tony Cisek’s scenic design – rusted containers on both sides, piled higher than the house itself – physically exaggerates rather than complements Wilson’s symbolic use of fences.

The playwright’s greatest gift is his ability to make sense of anger: He writes naturalistic scenes of genial humor turning into an explosive violence that flows from his characters and from the warping effect racism has had upon them. Humiliated in the larger world, these people fiercely guard their dignity close to home. Defeated by enemies too distant to see, they often lash out at their own kind.

Fences
through April 3
Arden Theatre
40 N. Second St.
Tickets $10-$40
215-922-1122
www.ardentheatre.org