Fences by August Wilson, City Theatre, February 26 - March 22

The City Theatre production of August Wilson's Fences is powerful, intelligent, deep, universal and fully realized. It is by far the most impressive modern drama staged to date in this Austin theatre season. This is theatre not to be missed.

The year is 1957, but it could be any time in history. The place is a black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, like that in which August Wilson grew up, but it could be any close-knit community. August Wilson has crafted for us a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, with a protagonist greater than ordinary men, one who has overcome immense adversity to establish a secure home for himself and his family. Troy Maxson, formerly a star baseball player in the Negro League, strives to preserve his gains but he is eventually brought low by character flaws in part inherent to his successes.

Yes, this is a play about the black experience in America, and those unique qualities of relationships, language, tradition, humor and social disadvantage are depicted with vividness and authenticity. There is not a false note anywhere in the script, the acting or the presentation. Congratulations to director Lisa Jordan and her cast. And to City Theatre's Andy Berkovsky for superbly evocative sound design.

Yet the themes and conflicts are universal -- a father's stern rigidity with his son, seeking to make him strong enough to overcome a world the father has known to be dangerous; the family as refuge against accident and disaster, whatever the origin; and the promise and compromise of marriage, that deep relation buffeted by disappointments and dependent upon mutual trust.

Troy Maxson retired from baseball after the age of 40 and has worked since then as a garbage man, riding with a partner on the back of a sanitation truck. He recently had the audacity to ask management why all the workers were black while the drivers were white; they refered him to the union. We meet Maxson, played by Robert Pellette, Jr., (left) coming home on payday with his friend Jim Bono (Rod Crain, right). They share a pint, laugh and joke with one another and then with Troy's wife Rose (Gina Hudson).


Appearing in Maxson's yard with its unfinished fence are, first, his brother Gabriel, an affable but deranged older man invalided home from World War II with a head wound, and, later, Lyons (Prince Camp, right), Maxson's son from a former marriage, who's a dapper, unemployed musician in search of a loan. Camp's portrayal is sly and appealing.

Robert Pellette as Troy Maxson is astonishing -- heavyset, voluble, energetic, concentrated and mercurial, whether making up tall tales, teasing wife and friends, fiercely reproving his sons, or, in his moments of greatest extremity, entering into dialogue with unseen Death. He is a life force, a man who has survived through hard work, talent and determination. The cost of his practical victories has been high. In part because of the deep deprivation of his own childhood, he is harshly dismissive of the efforts of his son Cory to win his approval and to emulate his successes in sports. And he yearns after a different refuge, an escape from the ceaseless demands of work, householding and deprivation.

This father-son relationship is as tense and dangerous as a live wire. The casting here is superb and the duo scenes are riveting. Pellette as Troy is a bulldozer, pitiless and demanding, suggesting to us the dogged determination that drove him up from poverty. Richard Romeo as Cory is wound up tight, conflicted between the desperate desire for approval and angry resentment at Troy's destruction of his chances to win a sports scholarship. They incarnate the mutual incomprehension of generations. "Why don't you like me?" bursts out of Cory, to be met with elaborate incomprehension from Troy: "Like you? Like you? I don't got to like you, boy. Who do you think put that roof over your head? Who give you something to eat?"

As Rose Maxson, Gina Houston (right) is patient and tolerant with all of her menfolk, and particularly of Troy's boyish flirtations with her. She is a provider and protector. She is a teller of truths, unafraid of her husband and ready to challenge him on his treatment of his sons or his loony brother Gabriel. In the second half of the piece, Houston twice rises to poetic intensity -- first, when in a bitter dialogue when Troy confesses to infidelities and to fathering a child, and in the final scene in a lengthy monologue delivered to son Cory. Her presence and eloquence win over a son thrown out of the house six years before.

Troy Maxson loses everything. He throws out Cory. Rose accepts the consequences of his infidelity but seals him out of her daily life. Even his friend Jim Bono uneasily finds excuses when urged to visit. Maxson is left in his own delirious face off with death.

McArthur Moore as Gabriel or "Uncle Gabe" (above, with Gina Houston) plays that simple, lost soul with the unpredictability and intensity of the great Shakespearian fools. His pension and war compensation paid for the Maxson house. For years Troy refuses to have Gabriel committed to a psychiatric hospital, even though the man is intermittently haunted by hell hounds and chases the children who mock him in the streets. Moore is hugely funny at times, eliciting bursts of appreciative laughter from the audience, and at other times he is distracted or haunted or spasmodic. His greatest pleasure is to present Rose with a rose.

Gabriel carries a battered old trumpet about with him and cheerily tells Rose about his conversations with Saint Peter. And at the end -- after Rosa has pronounced her own judgement of Troy to the hesitant Cory -- the last words are Moore's, after his trumpet has broken down and he rises to his own incomprehensible incantations for Troy Maxson.

In closing, a flower to T'Siyah Travis, the solemn young girl who plays Raynell, Troy's last begotten child. Her touching little scene with Richard Romeo as Cory is a bright medallion at the tragic finale, reminding us that family -- especially children and siblings -- carry forward our blood in the warmth of shared remembering.

Video interview of Robert Pellette and Richard Romeo, KTBC Fox-7 (3 minutes)

Austin Live Theatre article "The Incantations of August Wilson and 'Fences,'" published February 26

Review by Hannah Kenah in Austin Chronicle, March 12

Ryan E. Johnson's rave review on Austin.com, March 14: "Early favorite for best drama in Austin theater this year playing through March 22" . . . "City Theatre Company’s Fences is pitch perfect drama with almost all the elements down pat, from the set design, the acting, to the fight choreography, that doesn’t seem to have a single piece out of place. If you’re a theater fan, or even if you aren’t, this is one show you have to make it out to see."

The Incantations of August Wilson and "Fences" (City Theatre, February 26 - March 22)

You can find individual plays by August Wilson just about anywhere that dramatic literature is on offer. Half Price Books or Bookpeople, of course; and this combined edition is available at the Austin Public Library (Faulk Central Library). I spent a good deal of time with it over the past few weeks, preparing to review the City Theatre production of Wilson's Fences, which opens tomorrow, February 26, for a four week run (February 26 - March 22).

I didn't know Wilson, in large part because I'd spent a lot of the last three decades outside the United States. The press, the Kennedy Center, Wikipedia, and other sources call him one of the greatest American playwrights.

One account says that as he faced his imminent death from liver cancer at the age of 60, in 2005, Wilson teased his drama colleagues, asking them to make sure that his plays got produced "not just in February. I want them to be produced all year round." February, of course, is Black History Month.

Director Lisa Jordan and the Fences cast just about complied with Wilson's wishes. The scheduling hardly matters, though. Prince Camp, cast as one of two sons of the stolid former pro baseball player Troy Maxson, told me, "I read this play when I was just eighteen. I've always wanted to do it. I'm too young to play Troy and too old to play Cory [the other son]. But that doesn't matter. I would have swept the floor to be involved in this production."

The cast was running a full dress rehearsal this past Tuesday, happy to be at last in possession of the theatre and the set. They had been working since January in one temporary venue after another while North by Northwest Theatre Company had been doing The Shadow Box in the small but well appointed City Theatre. The theatre is tucked in a modest office building behind the Shell Station at Airport Road and 38 1/2 street. I met the cast in the semi-dark of backstage as they readied themselves for the opening scene, and some had the time to talk outside in the parking lot before they went onstage.

McArthur Moore plays Maxson's brother Gabriel, an invalided veteran of World War II, affable but slightly loony as a result of shrapnel wounds. A drama graduate from San Angelo State, Moore grinned when I compared Fences to Miller's Death of A Salesman. "In school I had to write an essay about that. Yes, they are a lot alike -- but there are lots of differences." Both plays center on a deep conflict between a father and a son; in each, the father's infidelity has a devastating effect on the marriage and the family.

In his preface to Three Plays, Wilson says that he was inspired to attempt play writing at the age of twenty when he first heard Bessie Smith sing the blues. Moore commented, "There's a lot of the blues in his plays -- in this one Troy sings about his 'Old Dog Blue.' But what I hear is jazz -- rhythms and changes, like Miles Davis or John Coltrane. And poetry. This is special language. Especially when you listen to the monologues -- some of them are structured like iambic pentameter."

Richard Romeo, who plays Cory, the younger son, agreed. "It's full of surprises, and sudden turns, both in the language and in the plot. And a lot of us can see ourselves in the relationship between Troy and Cory." Troy Maxson, retired baseball player from the Negro League, works on a garbage truck; he fiercely opposes son Corey's opportunity to earn a football scholarship, insisting instead that the boy should learn a trade -- something nobody can take away. "Cory is only 18," said Romeo, who is 21, an alumnus of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and studying drama at Texas State. "He wants to be like his father -- over and over, you see him swinging a bat. But Troy rejects that and finally throws Cory out of the house."

"It's tough love," said Camp (shown here, left, with Robert Pellette, Jr., playing Troy Maxson). "My father was just like that when I was offered a scholarship to study drama. He and my mother had six other kids, and they couldn't understand why I would do that -- even with a full ride." Camp, now 39, works for an Austin high tech company. He has appeared in film and in his own one-man show, presented at the Dougherty Arts Center. He's enrolled in the Dallas Theological Seminary, working on a master's degree in media arts and communications. "Another thing that's exciting is the amount of acting talent that's here in Austin," he said. "We didn't need to bring in anyone from the outside to play these roles. You could have had five times as many actors, and all of them qualified."

As the action continued, they returned to their places backstage. I sat for a while on an old sofa in the dimness, a silent observer. Backstage, one hears the play rather than sees it. Wilson's language is hypnotic, and I listened to Pellette as the dogged, self-confident Maxson teasing his wife Rose (Gina Houston), badgering Corey, and bantering with his brother Gabriel and his friend Jim Bono (Rod Crain).

Chicago actor/producer Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who worked with Wilson, commented for an AP piece on Wilson, ''August's language is the natural rhythm and language of Southern black folk - what I call 'Northern colored people' - people who came from the South to the North but brought all their colored ways and colored style in the beauty, the nuance and the integrity that they always had down South. It's very warm, very vivid, very passionate.'' And Derrick Sanders, who has also directed Wilson's works, was succinct but direct: "Wilson is a lot like Shakespeare."

August Wilson was prolific. He wrote a cycle of ten plays, setting one in each decade of the 20th century, locating them mostly in his own hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He won a long list of awards. Fences, for example, received a Pulitzer prize, the New York Drama Critics Award and the Tony Award for Best Play. In 2005 the Virginia Theatre on Broadway was renamed the August Wilson Theatre. Last year the Kennedy Center sponsored staged readings of the full ten-cycle series. This year, a revival of Fences will open on Broadway, taking Wilson's work back to where he had his great successes.

NPR interview with August Wilson, with links to extensive additional audio material

"August Wilson" on Wikipedia