A Relevant Past
In the age of Obama, does Fences still resonate?
By Kyle Bass |
The cast of Fences in Seattle Rep’s original production, 1986. |
In light of the election of Barack Obama, our nation's first African-American president, it’s
easy to ask if a play about an African American garbage man scarred by racism and bitter because
of dreams denied him is still relevant.
On the surface this easy question also seems reasonable. Not only is Fences about an
oppressed black man (a species some optimists say fell into extinction on January 20, 2009), but
a twenty-five-year-old play about an oppressed black man, and from where we stand, a play that
speaks of a time fifty-three years behind us. But Fences is about more than an oppressed black
garbage man. In Fences, as in all of his plays, August Wilson demands that we understand and
accept African-American culture as specific and unique, bound to a past of bondage. But equally
present in Wilson’s plays is a proud and poetic celebration of African-American culture, a
culture that has endured, evolved, and been shaped within the crucible of a wider society
infected with prejudice, racism, and bigotry.
Wilson said Fences was inspired by American artist Romare Bearden’s collage work
Continuities, which depicts the image of a black man with a baby in his arms standing next to a
woman. He said his goal in writing Fences was “to prove that, contrary to myth and stereotype,
black men are responsible.”
If the standard of responsible fatherhood is a husband living monogamously with his wife and
supportive of his children with her, and the stereotype of the African-American father exploits
anything that falls short, then how are we to understand Troy Maxson, this flawed man, difficult
father and less than ideal husband, as a picture of responsibility? The answer that Wilson
provides us in Fences is a complex one.
At first take, Troy Maxson seems to support the very stereotypes that Wilson means to correct
(I won’t give away crucial elements of the plot here). But it’s in Troy’s dealings with his
children that the truth of his complex sense of responsible fatherhood is revealed.
Wilson wants us to understand the truth of an African-American father who, like all fathers,
possesses both strengths and weaknesses. It is the coexistence of his strengths and weaknesses
that make Troy Maxson a strikingly human figure, challenging stereotypes while at the same time
acknowledging the very cultural and historical roots from which those stereotypes are nefariously
extracted and proliferated as the only “truth,” a truth as good as a lie.
With Troy Maxson, Wilson creates the image of a black man struggling, and in many ways
succeeding, albeit on his own terms, to fulfill his role as a father and a husband, even though
his children, his wife, and his best friend all see room for improvement. In deconstructing
long-held stereotypes of black men as fathers and husbands, and the black women—mistresses and
wives and mothers—who love, support, and endure these men, bear and care for the children—Wilson
reveals the complex truths of African-American culture by addressing that culture from within,
linking his black characters to their past, which shapes them in their black present.
While Wilson had not yet conceived the idea of a cycle of plays when he wrote Fences, it has
taken its rightful place as one of the brightest in what is a crown of gems—a wide, truthful
view of a people during a century of change in a land of paradox. In 2010, that truth remains
relevant.
Kyle Bass is the dramaturg for Fences. He is also the Resident Dramaturg at Syracuse Stage
where this production of Fences will travel after the run at Seattle Rep.
© Kyle Bass, 2010
