Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T08:28:29.590Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - Safe at home?: August Wilson’s Fences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2008

Christopher Bigsby
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Get access

Summary

'Some people build fences to keep people out . . .

And other people build fences to keep people in.'

Jim Bono, Fences

August Wilson was one of America's most gifted storytellers. His plays read like fiction, the narrative drive, symbolic settings, evocative stage directions, music, and characters themselves propelling the action with a sparkling performativity. This sense of storytelling is nowhere more evident than in Fences (1985). No wonder Lloyd Richards, who directed so many of Wilson's plays throughout their careers, suggested one year before its Broadway premiere, on 26 March 1987, at the Street 46th Theatre, that the playwright was 'one of the most compelling storytellers to begin writing for the theater in many years'. Following the success of his first Broadway play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences, which in 1987 won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, confirmed the arrival of a theatrical voice of genuine originality.

Fences concerns the lives of the Maxsons, an African American family whose struggles are chronicled from 1957 to 1965. The dates, of course, encompass a key period in the civil rights movement, but this was also the time in which Wilson was a teenager and high school student, and experienced the full force of white racism. Ostensibly a fairly straightforward domestic drama, Fences, by the final blackout, has expanded into an enabling fable of rebellion and recovery, of myth and history, and of confrontation and expiation. Asked two years before his death if he considered Fences his 'signature play', Wilson commented that that accolade would go to Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986). But, most theatregoers and critics feel, Fences remains one of his finest achievements.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×