Fences

Fences puts Troy Maxson in his own backyard: a refuse collector in his fifties who was once a formidable baseball player and has never stopped being angry about the career he was refused. He is funny, domineering and entirely certain he is right, and his family lives inside that certainty.

His son Cory wants to take a football scholarship. Troy will not allow it, and tells himself he is protecting the boy. Rose, his wife, has spent eighteen years holding the household together while asking for very little. Bono, his oldest friend, sees what Troy is doing some time before Troy does. Across one summer the fence Troy keeps not finishing becomes the thing everyone is really arguing about.

August Wilson wrote it as the 1950s entry in his ten-play cycle charting Black life decade by decade across the twentieth century. It reached the stage in the mid-1980s, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, swept the main theatre awards of its season, and has been revived and taught continuously since.

The writing is enormous and the play is domestic. Troy talks in long, tall, half-mythical runs, and every character eventually gets the speech that reframes everything. The comedy is real and the cruelty arrives inside it. It is a play about inheritance, and about a man who cannot tell love apart from control.

Fences is for anyone who has had a difficult father or been one. It works on people who have never seen a play before, and it rewards anyone who has already seen a hundred.