Director’s Notes

When a person has spent their entire life trapped behind real and imagined fences, they cannot go after their dreams. In August Wilson’s masterwork, we see a man at once proud and humiliated, hopeful and disillusioned, passionate and yet powerless to surmount the obstacles of racial prejudice, family obligations and self-imposed emotional walls that block his way at every turn. As the drama’s compelling central character, Troy Maxson also embodies the inequalities and injustices confronting Black Americans throughout the painful course of our country’s history.

Although the Maxson family’s story is not my own, I can certainly relate to dreams unrealized as well as relish Wilson’s unabashed celebration and joy of Black life—our speech patterns, traditions, rituals, shared knowledge, ancestral legacy, music, art, mythology. Wilson creates music and magic with his powerful, spellbinding and poetic language.

I believe it was a Robert Frost poem that had the line “Good fences make good neighbors.” Well, there is only one fence being built in this play, but the play has many metaphorical fences. We learn that a psychological fence went up around Troy after his father severely beat him and chased him off when he was only 14 years old. We also learn that Troy was an extraordinary Negro League baseball player, but when he is denied playing in the major leagues because he is Black, that action joins others to alter his worldview and prevents him from seeing the few positive changes happening around him (the play is set right at the cusp of the Civil Rights movement). So we have Troy, scarred by racism and by the cycle of physical and mental abuse from his father, seemingly doomed to repeat this pattern with his family. The cycle of dysfunction and separation seems as if it will destroy the Maxson family and all of Troy’s relationships. However, I profoundly believe that dysfunctional cycles can be broken. With Fences, Wilson asks us to imagine how Troy’s children, unlike their father, will find their own way in a new world, discovering new values for their generation and new opportunities to go after their dreams.

At a time when the minority power brokers are working fast and hard to literally whitewash the nation’s history—and that of African Americans— it is important to tell this story, because by exploring African American perspectives and culture, and examining and recognizing America’s legacy of racism, we have a chance, by working together, to make “good trouble” and effect positive change for the future.

Eleanore Tapscott, Director

August Wilson’s Fences was originally produced on Broadway by Carole Shorenstein Hays, in association with Yale Repertory Theatre.

World Premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre (Lloyd Richards, Artistic Director; Benjamin Mordecai, Managing Director); Second Production at the Goodman Theatre (Robert Falls, Artistic Director; Roche Schulfer, Managing Director).

Initially given a staged reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s 1983 National Playwrights Conference.

August Wilson’s Fences opened in April 1985 at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and on Broadway in May 1987 at the 46th Street Theatre.