Of Fences and Offenses

            Last night my wife and I experienced the privilege of opening night at the Space Theatre for August Wilson’s Fences, his Pulitzer and Tony Award winning play about a black former baseball player whose dream of playing in the majors never gets a chance. In fact, if he is the Jackie Robinson who never made it to the big time it is mainly because he spent his prime in prison. After prison and long past his biological window for baseball success, he eventually settles for a job as a garbage collector for the city of Pittsburgh, the setting for all of Wilson’s plays. As the play unfolds we learn Troy is fighting to become the first black driver of a Pittsburgh garbage truck rather than remain confined to being a mere garbage can handler at the back of the truck.

            As with all of Wilson’s plays racism serves as the fuse that burns slowly through the early stages but inevitably what must ignite is more universal human dynamite, the measuring stick of all great literature. Wilson is no playfully punning Frost whose narrator in “Mending Wall” challenges his neighbor’s adage “good fences make good neighbors” by asking what they are walling in or walling out as they restore the rocks that have been “frost-heaved” and tumbled from a stone wall that separates their properties:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

                Wilson’s protagonist is named Troy implying he is capable of catastrophic, large-scale destruction... including self-destruction. He is of classic scale, larger than life, orbiting somewhere between Loman and Lear.  From the beginning we see him strutting around in front of his dilapidated house within what is the beginning of a new wooden picket fence that he adds to on weekends during most of the play. As his humiliation of working at the back of the garbage truck is relieved by his promotion to driver, so is his humanity diminished by the  appetite for more that blossoms unchecked into selfishness and grandiosity at the hands of an unstoppable charismatic “de-fenceless” ego let loose by even a small success. He is now in the driver’s seat, so off he goes. He lacks the self-discipline to manage his new power and freedom constructively and lets it run on a path to self-destruction and isolation. There is no fence to hold him. We need fear the fences of our own making more than those imposed.

                Meanwhile, he prevents his youngest son Corey from having the chance to use sports, in this case football, to make his mark and go to college ostensibly because Troy wants to protect him from the pain of being denied fulfillment of that dream. In reality, Troy himself refuses to recognize that his own behavior, not racism, was instrumental in his failure to become a major league baseball player. So he builds a fence around Corey consisting of various interventions that prevent him from fulfilling his dream. Troy cannot stand the thought of either son transcending his own garbage-collecting station in life. That’s how selfish Troy is.

                The final expression of this selfishness loses the affection and devotion of his wife when he announces he is having a child with another woman. His excuses are all self-serving and add to the fence he has built walling himself out of a meaningful life. He ends up essentially friendless, wifeless, and fellow workerless by having moved to the driver’s seat of the garbage truck his life has become.

                The message is we become our enemy. Frost was on to something.  We may think we are walling in when we are walling out and giving everyone offence (a fence). At the end of the play Corey returns home in a Marine corporal’s uniform but he is still giving power to his chief oppressor, his father, who is now dead and about to be buried. His mother, half- brother, and even his young half-sister gradually break down his defenses little by little and take apart the fences he has built that still allow him to be his father’s prisoner. He is finally freed to attend his father’s funeral and bury not only his father but the legacy of anger and hatred his lineage has so adamantly maintained for generations. He is free at last from the bondage of others but especially the bondage of self.     

                What made this production especially great was the very high level of acting across the stage throughout the play. All the characters were believable, wonderfully human, and flawlessly represented.  For a first show or even a seasoned production, the details were exquisitely refined.

                I will not soon forget this production, and I will never look at a fence the same again.