A flawed man builds a fence around his family the best way he knows: withholding acknowledgments of love from his sons to toughen their hides, while taking advantage of his wife’s willingness to deny her own doubts that he is the finest husband in the world.
The late playwright August Wilson’s Pulitzer prize-winning Fences was written in 1984 and set in 1957, the second in his cycle of 10 plays covering each decade of the 20th century. The play’s poetic vernacular is specific to working-class African American lives, a theatrical ode to the people Wilson knew growing up in urban Pittsburgh.
Fences explores how each member of one African American family tries to transform the burden of limitations imposed upon them, by their country’s strict racial divide and stark structural inequality. As director Shari Sebbens puts it in the program for this new production at Sydney Theatre Company, Wilson’s plays reached “upwards and inwards” to address this divide, “not in a reconciliatory gesture but as a means of self-determination”.
Watching Fences in Australia – this is the first time Wilson’s play has been staged here – parallels could be drawn with Indigenous Australians’ fight for truth-telling, sovereignty and economic advancement. But the universal is also evident in the story of Troy Maxson, a 53-year-old failed baseball player portrayed with great presence here by Bert LaBonté as a patriarch who, like King Lear, wrestles with self-destruction, the spectre of death, and meaningful connections with his children.
Troy, a garbage collector who has done time in jail for knifing a man he tried to rob, has been married to Rose (a compelling Zahra Newman) for 18 years, and they have a 17-year-old son, Cory (Darius Williams) who has great prospects for a football career. Troy, who is illiterate, opposes his son’s sporting fancy, wanting him to instead concentrate on “book-learning” so he can “fix cars and build houses”, but Cory suspects his father is acting out of envy.
Fences comes with a huge pedigree. Hollywood star Denzel Washington directed and starred as Troy in the film adaptation, which was nominated for four Academy Awards in 2017, with Viola Davis winning the Oscar for best supporting actress for her searing portrayal as Rose. Washington and Davis previously honed their understanding of these characters in a Broadway revival of Wilson’s play in 2010.
Sebbens’s production stands up to the inevitable comparison. The cast is uniformly excellent, and they pay keen attention to Wilson’s rhythms and locutions while maintaining convincing accents. Designer Jeremy Allen’s finely detailed two-storey house, porch, and garden recalls the usual set for the epic tragedy of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, another domestic play centred on a morally flawed patriarch.
I found myself believing LaBonté and Newman were a couple, such is their chemistry. In a key scene where Troy delivers devastating news to Rose, Newman’s emotional response is slower to build than Davis’s indelible effort, but Newman’s take on Rose’s devastation is nonetheless affecting. LaBonté, meanwhile, might have made more of Troy’s soliloquy with the Grim Reaper, though the film’s thunder and lightning treatment of this scene tipped a little into melodrama.
Darius Williams plays Cory here with more physical bravado than Jovan Adepo did in the film; a son more willing to shirtfront his father. I wondered about this choice of playing a more fearless Cory, but was sold on the poignancy of his delivery, plaintively asking his dad: “How come you ain’t never liked me?”
There are very good supporting actors here, too, particularly Dorian Nkono, locating the stuttering physicality of Troy’s brother Gabriel who, after a brain injury, totes a trumpet and basket like his archangel namesake, passionately declaring the day of judgment is coming. His purity of heart signals hope.
For the most part, the STC’s production hits the high-water marks of dramatic intensity. It’s a remarkable achievement, reconfirming Wilson’s place in the theatrical canon.
Fences is at the Wharf 1 theatre, Sydney until 6 May
