Fences Powerpoint Presentation

1. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Fences
August Wilson
(1945-2005)
35

2. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Introduction
•Fences opened in Broadway on March 26, 1987, and ran for 525 performances, a
remarkable run for a drama.
•The play starred James Earl Jones and was directed by Lloyd Richards, Dean of the Yale
School of Drama (1979-1991) and the director of the original Broadway production of A
Raisin in the Sun in 1959.
•In his New York Times review, Frank Rich wrote, “Fences leaves no doubt that Mr.
Wilson is a major writer, combining a poet's ear for vernacular with a robust sense of
humor (political and sexual), a sure instinct for crackling dramatic incident and a
passionate commitment to a great subject.”
•In the New York Post, Clive Barnes stated, “In many respects, Fences falls into the
classic pattern of the American drama – a family play, with a tragically doomed
American father locked in conflict with his son. Greek tragedy with a Yankee accent.”
•Fences won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Drama Desk Award for Best New Play, the
New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play, and the Tony Award for Best Play.

3. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
August Wilson
•August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, PA, in an impoverished section
known as the Hill District. He was raised in a two-room apartment without hot
water or a telephone. His German father abandoned him and his African-
American mother and saw Wilson rarely.
•Wilson’s mother remarried and moved to a white neighborhood where mother
and son experienced much racism.
•Wilson stopped going to school at the age of fifteen when a teacher falsely
accused him of plagiarizing a paper on Napoleon. A voracious reader, Wilson
spent his days in the local library.
•As a young man he developed his love for the blues and different forms of
African-American expression. He dedicated himself to becoming a writer by his
late teens. In the 1970s, Wilson took the last name of his mother.

4. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Wilson continued …
•Frustrated by his lack of direction, his mother threw
him out of the house. Wilson enlisted in the army, but
spent only one year in active service before returning
to Pittsburgh to live in a boarding house.
•He began writing poetry, but did not have much of an
impact as a poet. But he said, “After writing poetry
for twenty-one years, I approach the play the same
way. The mental process is poetic: you use metaphor
and condense.”
•In 1969, Wilson, with playwright and teacher Rob
Penny, founded Black Horizons on the Hill, a black
activist theater company, which gave Wilson an
opportunity to present his plays mostly in public
schools and community centers.

5. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Wilson continued …
•In 1978 Wilson moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, when he was invited to write plays
for a black theater founded by Claude Purdy. His first significant play, Jitney,
revealed promise, and would be reworked later for larger productions.
•In 1982, Wilson met Lloyd Richards, who offered to produce Wilson’s work at Yale.
At Yale, Wilson emerged as a major dramatist.
•Wilson’s first play at Yale was Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which opened to a
successful Broadway run with Lloyd as director on October 11, 1984.
•With the opening of Fences on Broadway in 1987, Wilson’s reputation soared.

6. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Wilson continued …
•Subsequent Broadway premieres and awards awaited him and
his new plays. In 1990, he won his second Pulitzer for The
Piano Lesson.
•In total, Wilson won two Pulitzer Prizes and seven New York
Drama Critics Circle Awards, and he has received twenty-three
honorary degrees.
•Married three times, Wilson died of liver cancer in 2005.
•On October 16, 2005, fourteen days after Wilson's death, the
Virginia Theatre on Broadway was renamed the August Wilson
Theatre, the first Broadway house to be named after an African
American.

7. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
The Pittsburgh Cycle
•Fences is a part of August Wilson’s ten-play cycle that explores the
African-American experience in the twentieth century.
•“I’m taking each decade and looking at one of the most important
questions that blacks confronted in that decade and writing a play
about it. … Put them all together and you have a history.”
•Collectively, the plays are known as the Pittsburgh Cycle ― all but
one take place in the city's Hill District.

8. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Pittsburgh Cycle continued …
•Wilson completed the cycle, but the plays were not written in chronological order.
1900s ― Gem of the Ocean (2003)
1910s
―
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988)
1920s ― Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1985), set in Chicago
1930s
―
The Piano Lesson (1990)
1940s
―
Seven Guitars (1995)
1950s
―
Fences (1987)
1960s
―
Two Trains Running (1991)
1970s
―
Jitney (1982)
1980s
―
King Hedley II (1999)
1990s
―
Radio Golf (2005)
•The Pittsburgh Cycle is recognized as one of the great achievements in the American
theater.

9. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
"He was a giant figure in American theater …
Heroic is not a word one uses often without
embarrassment to describe a writer or
playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of
effort behind the creation of his body of work
is really an epic story.”

― Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America

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Wilson as Dramatist
•Wilson said that his plays are influenced by the “4 B’s”: the Blues; fellow
playwright and poet, Amiri Baraka; author, Jorge Luis Borges, and painter,
Romare Bearden.
•“I see the blues as a book of literature and it influences everything I do. …
Blacks' cultural response to the world is contained in blues.”
•From Baraka and plays like The Dutchman, Wilson was inspired to write
directly and aggressively of the African-American experience.
•From the novelist Borges, Wilson was inspired to include elements of the
fantastic or magical realism into his plays.
•Regarding Bearden, Wilson claimed, "When I saw his work, it was the first
time that I had seen black life presented in all its richness, and I said, 'I want
to do that—I want my plays to be the equal of his canvases.’”

11. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Fences
“Wilson’s ambitions extend far beyond simple storytelling. … A
mythmaker who sees his basically panorama-plays as stages in
an allegorical history of black America, Wilson is also a folk
ethnologist, collecting prototypical stories, testimonies, rituals
of speech and behavior, which he embeds in his larger
compositions. Buried deepest of all, under the dramatist
Wilson, the mythmaker-cum-social historian Wilson, and the
folklorist-ethnologist Wilson, is a tormented and complex
ideologue Wilson, carrying on anguished debates with himself
about such politically engrossing matters as black male-female
relations, the use of black economic power, and the place of
the church in the black community.”
― Michael Feingold in The Village Voice, April 7, 1987

12. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
“My concern was the idea of
missed possibilities. Music and
sports were the traditional
inroads for blacks, and in both
Ma Rainey and Fences, with both
Levee and Troy, even those
inroads fail.”
– August Wilson

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Fences – Opening Stage Directions
•The stage directions that introduce the play are lengthy
and specific. Consider Wilson’s description of the
Maxson house: strong with a “sturdy porch” … in
need of repair and maintenance … “ancient” and
“badly in need of paint” … “lacks congruence” … is
of “dubious value” … located “off a small alley in a
big-city neighborhood.” These details suggest
weariness, exclusion, frustration, and disappointment.
•Subsequent paragraphs contrast the European
immigrant experience with that of the descendants of
African slaves. By 1957, the time of the play, those
early twentieth-century European immigrants were full
participants in the American Dream and had
contributed to making the 1950s a decade during
which life seemed “rich, full, and flourishing.”
1957 World Series

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Stage Directions continued…
• On the surface, 1957 seemed so placid that the World Series might
have been the most remarkable event – of course, Wilson’s
mention of the Series also introduces the importance of baseball to
the play. But as Wilson suggests, there was a strong undercurrent
beneath those seemingly placid waters, one that would not remain
submerged in the 1960s. Instead, this undercurrent, which flows
through Troy Maxson, would make the next decade “turbulent,
racing, dangerous, and provocative.”
• Wilson uses his elaborate stage directions to set the tone of his
main characters’ lives and the tone of the play. The setting is filled
with the weariness and frustration that follows broken dreams.

15. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Troy Maxson
•Literally and figuratively, Troy is a large, powerful man. As
his wife Rose says, when he “walked through the house he
was so big he filled it up,” but he didn’t always leave room
for others.
•Troy’s first name suggests the legendary city of Troy (from
Homer’s Iliad) – and Fences is about the fall of Troy Maxson.
His surname, Maxson, is an amalgamation of Mason and
Dixon, i.e., the Mason-Dixon line, which separated the slave
states from the free states. Troy was raised in the South,
served a lengthy prison sentence, and lived subsequent
years in the North.
•Troy’s life has been filled with hope and disappointment. He
was an outstanding baseball player in prison, but his
professional career was disappointing because of the color
barrier in Major League Baseball. He confronts his boss to
become a driver of the garbage truck, but is disappointed
with being separated from his friends behind the truck.

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Troy and Self-Mythologizing
•Much of Troy’s hope derives from his bolstering of himself
and his low self-esteem through self-mythologizing.
•He draws on the Bible to recreate himself as a man of
mythical or Biblical proportions. He tells of wrestling with
Death, which recalls Jacob’s wrestling with an angel. He
fights off Death for three days and three nights; as a
result, he has learned to “be ever vigilant.”
•Troy wants to give himself grandeur, power, and a sense
of immortality.
•He wants those around him to admire him the way fans
once admired him.

17. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Troy and Responsibility
•Troy’s values are rooted in his sense of responsibility. He carries out his
responsibilities diligently and he expects others to fulfill their responsibilities
to him. As he tells Cory, “Mr. Rand don’t give me my money come payday
cause he likes me. He gives me cause he owe me.”
•This emphasis on responsibility may work well for Troy in the workplace, but it
fails him at home. Responsibility displaces love as the most important family
value for Troy. Troy explains to Cory why he provides for him: “… cause you
my son. You my flesh and blood. Not ‘cause I like you! Cause it’s my duty to
take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you! ... I ain’t got to like you.”
•Troy’s sense of responsibility is shortsighted as it costs him an opportunity to
get close to his son.
•Troy’s emphasis on responsibility, which he defines in financial terms, allows
for an extramarital affair.

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Responsibility continued …
•Although he loves his wife, he seems to feel little guilt over the affair. He never
apologizes to Rose. He might feel justified because he turns over his paycheck to
her and because Alberta offers him more laughter, joy, and veneration: “I can sit
up in her house and laugh … she firmed up my backbone,” but “I take my pay
and give it to you. I don’t have no money but what you give me back. I just want
to have a little time to myself … a little time to enjoy life.”
•Troy may be fiscally responsible, but as a husband and father he is otherwise
selfish, self-indulgent, hypocritical, and emotionally irresponsible.
•Consider Troy’s song, “Old Blue.” For Troy, “Old Blue” is about loyalty and the
failure of human love. Only Troy’s dog Blue was there to awaken him after his
father’s brutal beating. All of Troy’s human relationships – beginning with his
mother’s abandonment of him – have failed Troy. At the end, Cory and Raynell
sing “Old Blue” to signal both their respect for and their forgiveness of their
father.

19. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Troy and Baseball
•Troy uses baseball as a metaphor throughout the play. Baseball not only gives his life
direction, but it also gives him a vocabulary for self-expression. Although Troy may be
illiterate, his use of baseball imagery is at times poetic and always expressive.
•He began life, he says, with two strikes against him, defines death as “nothing but a
fastball on the outside corner,” and explains his affair as trying to steal second base after
the frustration of standing on first base for so long. At that point, Rose is understandably
frustrated by his baseball metaphors: “We’re not talking about baseball! We’re talking
about you going off to lay in bed with another woman.” Troy responds, “Rose, you’re not
listening to me. I’m trying the best I can to explain it to you.” But Rose is insensitive to
her husband’s only means of articulation.
•Troy says he was born with “two strikes” against
him.” What are those two strikes? Poverty? Being
African American in a racist culture? Being abandoned
by his mother and being raised by an abusive father?

20. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Rose
•Rose is committed to family and church. She tries to be an intermediary between father
and son, explaining Cory to Troy in an effort to soften the father. She tries also to get
Troy to see life more realistically. When he mythologizes his past, she corrects him or
tells him to “hush that talk.”
•Rose is understandably disappointed and hurt by Troy’s affair, but her bitter response is
destructive of not just Troy and their marriage, but herself as well: “From right now …
this child got a mother. But you a womanless man.” Rose does not practice the
Christian precept of forgiveness, and, as a result, she lives a lonely life.
•However, she passes on her understanding of her mistake and convinces Cory to be
forgiving of Troy. See her lengthy speech near the very end of the play.
•Rose takes in Raynell not just out of sympathy and selflessness, but also because
Raynell is the daughter that she always wanted but never had: “… but I took on to
Raynell like she was all them babies I had wanted and never had.”

21. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Rose continued …
•Rose expresses the failure of her marriage in gardening
terms of stunted plants and ungerminated seeds:
“Troy, I took all my feelings, my wants and
needs, my dreams… and I buried them inside
you. I planted a seed and watched and
prayed over it. I planted myself inside you
and waited to bloom. And it didn’t take me no
eighteen years to find out the soil was hard
and rocky and it wasn’t never gonna bloom.”

•However, Rose does not rely on the gardening imagery as
much as Troy relies on baseball imagery. Rose’s
language is often unmetaphoric and direct.

22. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
Cory
•By the end of the play, Cory seems ready to embrace the higher values of his
father and mother. He has demonstrated responsibility in the Marines; after
six years he has risen in rank to corporal, and, after his discussion with Rose,
he has learned to forgive his father.
•The way for Cory to escape his father’s shadow, as Rose told him, is through
forgiveness, not stubbornness, which staying away from the funeral would have
indicated.
•Cory can move forward without the ghost of his father to haunt him.

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Religion
•There are several references to the Bible, Jesus, and Rose’s
church, all of which point out the strong role of Christianity in
the African-American community.
•Troy is critical of Rose’s church and ministers. Rose is active in
her church and when she bakes for the cake sale, Troy
comments, “All them preachers looking for somebody to fatten
their pockets.” Troy is obsessed with economics, so much so
that he cuts himself off from the possibility of spiritual
fulfillment as offered by the church.
•What other religious images and references appear in the
play? What are their implications?

24. Literature: Craft & Voice | Delbanco and Cheuse | Chapter 35
The Ending
•The most important religious symbol is Gabriel, especially his
actions that close the play.
•The ending of Fences suggests that Wilson might not be
pleased with those Christian churches who rely too completely
on the white Christian tradition.
•Gabriel, who thinks himself the Archangel Gabriel, blows on
his trumpet, but he is unable to open the gates of heaven for
Troy. His failure leads him to “a frightful realization,” and he
begins “a dance of atavistic signature and ritual” that opens
heaven’s gate.
•Wilson might be suggesting that black churches, for spiritual
wholeness, must consider their African roots in their rituals
and spiritual experiences.