Fences by August Wilson is Better than Tennessee Williams

“GABRIEL: Better get ready for the judgement 

Better get ready for the judgement 

My Lord is coming down” (30)

When my school’s wonderful tech director Ms. Lentz lent me the play Fences (thanks!), I immediately remembered the Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall.” It follows two neighbors as they repair the divide between their property. While the narrator is charmed by the beauty of nature, his companion is more interested in maintaining their mutual barrier:

“He only says ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

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 offense” (“Mending Wall”)

In August Wilson’s most famous work, there are no cows, nor is there beautiful spring weather or wary neighbors. But Fences uses the same watchful, challenging energy to tell the story of its chosen subjects: a working-class Black family in Pittsburgh’s Hill District and the fence that, over the course of the play, rises around them. Their patriarch Troy Maxson, who was played by James Earl Jones in the original 1983 production, hopes do do the impossible: walling out Death himself.

“TROY: I ain’t worried about Death. I done seen him. I done wrestled with him. Look here, Bono…I looked up one day and Death was marching straight at me. Like soldiers on Parade. The Army of Death was marching straight at me…I know he’s gonna get me. I know I got to join his army…his camp followers. But as long as I keep my strength and see him coming…as long as I keep up my vigilance…he’s going to have to fight to get me. I ain’t going easy” (16-17) 

Troy’s ambition is noble—at least, it’s no more ignoble than the ambitions of Jay Gatsby or Holden Caulfield—but his life is stifled. He is neither as faithful nor as responsible as he initially claims to be. He is the first Black man in Pittsburgh history to drive a garbage truck, but his real dreams of baseball stardom have been permanently deferred. He preaches a gospel of accountability while neglecting his wife and terrorizing his son. By the end of the play, his family is left to reckon with his mixed legacy.

Sounds pretty standard, right?

But Fences is more than just a work of late-20th-century masculine angst. It’s a fabulous play with the second-most beautiful dialogue I have ever read*. I suspect the people who praise A Streetcar Named Desire have never read Fences; Wilson’s language is just as delicate and moving as Williams’, and has the added benefit of occasionally sounding like something people would actually say. Or maybe it’s the people who say it that feel so real.

This play features Satan as a furniture dealer and the Archangel Gabriel as a mentally-disabled veteran, and it is still more believable than Streetcar. Troy, Rose and their children aren’t heroes or villains in a compact tragedy. They’re people challenged by forces divine and personal, experiencing a handful of moments in a continuum of years. Day by day, decade by decade, the Maxson family endures.

When I picked up Fences, I didn’t know it was the sixth installment of Wilson’s epic “Century Cycle.” The playwright’s other works, including Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Two Trains Running, which I saw a few years ago at the Milwaukee Rep, form a panorama of Black life in the 20th century. If all of the plays in this saga are as good as Fences, I look forward to reading them.

Though I don’t know much about Wilson’s life or his other works, I trust his artistry wholeheartedly. In the Century Cycle, as in Fences, no one is permanently walled in or out. There is always an opportunity to peer over the wall, and see the story from another side.

“CORY: The whole time I was growing up…living in his house…Papa was like a shadow that followed you everywhere. It weighed on you and sunk into your flesh. It would wrap around you and lay there until you couldn’t tell which one was you anymore. That shadow digging in your flesh. Trying to crawl in. Trying to live through you. Everywhere I looked, Troy Maxson was staring back at me”

 

*The most beautiful dialogue I have ever read appears in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. It's great, but in a different way than Wilson is great. In Arcadia, artifice is prized.