Fences at OSF

Even before Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom made his name on Broadway, playwright August Wilson was intent on avoiding the all-too-common fate of a one-play career. For that second play he also gave himself a specific challenge: to follow the eccentric structure and multiple focus of “Ma Rainey” with a more conventional narrative centered on a single complex character.

 So from experiences and characteristics of his step-father and a near neighbor, and from his own home-run-hitting prowess as a teenager, Wilson created Troy Maxson, a baseball legend in the Negro League kept out of the segregated major leagues until he was too old, so that at the age of 53 in 1957, he works for the city of Pittsburgh collecting garbage.

 The resulting play is Fences, which earned Wilson his first Pulitzer, Tony award and other prizes in 1987, and has been his most popular play ever since (though it was never his favorite.) It’s scheduled for a Broadway revival in the fall, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production is on stage in Ashland now.

 From that first production, this story of a husband and father, his wife, his sons and brother, and their relationships to each other and to their own individuality, was recognized for its universal themes. But the universal is best expressed in the particular—which is one of those truisms that’s often true.

 Certainly Troy Maxson’s story as it is gradually revealed expresses aspects of the African American experience. Yet there are other specifics that resonated for me when I saw the OSF production. I recognized the 1950s, especially among the working/lower middle class, and specifically in Pittsburgh. I grew up some 30 miles from where August Wilson did, at about the same time (we were both pre-teens in 1957.) So when Troy talks about hitting a home run and says, “you can kiss it goodbye,” I recognized the locution of a particular Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster of that era.

 Yet despite our proximities, the worlds of Wilson’s plays were mostly foreign to me—except this one. The terms of the respect Troy demands from his son are specifically familiar from the black family next door, and a boy I grew up with. I heard Troy’s speeches about not wasting time on anything other than preparing to make a living from fathers of many ethnicities, including my own.

 Charles Robinson as Troy Maxson accentuated this familiarity. His relentless insistence on dominating by having the answer for everything, combined with his compact, wiry frame, reminded me of many 1950s fathers. Yet casting him as Troy was risky. Wilson describes the character as “a large man,” and from James Earl Jones on, large men have played him in the first generation of productions while Wilson was alive. This can be important to Troy’s character and the play’s most dramatic moments: the contrast between Troy’s largeness of body and need, and the constrictions he rebels against, while in other ways he continues to bear the fate and the heavy responsibilities that define him.

 It’s also important to the white societal fear and other images associated with big black men. So some of those dramatic moments and motivations seem less than they could be, and while the efficient naturalism of this production has its virtues, there are mythic qualities of Troy that go missing.

 Still, it’s certainly worth taking some trouble to see. Director Leah Gardiner makes full use of the stage to keep the eye involved, as the ear is entranced by Wilson’s trademark stage poetry. Robinson performs very well, as do the other actors (Shona Tucker as his wife, Rose; Josiah Phillips as his friend, Bono; Kevin Kenerly and Cameron Knight as his sons, Lyons and Cory; G. Valmont Thomas as his brother, Gabriel; and Catiana Graham and Dominique Moore alternating as his daughter, Raynell.)

 They speak the rhythms of Wilson’s words, which together with the backyard set by Scott Bradley and lighting by Dawn Chiang—naturalistic and mythic at the same time—create stage magic.