It begins sweetly, the easy jousting of two old friends, Jim
Bono and Troy Maxson, so innocently that the audience is quickly ushered into
their lives. Although these are two
garbage men returning at the end of a work week in 1957 Pittsburgh, a bottle of
gin to share, and are African-Americans, we identify with the universality of
their banter. Troy has dutifully brought
his weekly pay to give to his wife, Rose, and enjoys spinning yarns to his appreciative
listener, Bono. So begins August Wilson’s
Pulitzer Prize winning Fences and
Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production which steadily builds to a cathartic climax.
Palm Beach Dramaworks' Producing Artistic Director, Bill Hayes, also
the Director of Fences, has undertaken
to make this production a signature piece in his company’s long history of triumphs.
He picks PBD’s productions with a vision
for their excellence and relevancy to our lives and then selects a cast to work
with its talented technical crew.
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| John Archie, Lester Purry |
Here the cast are all accomplished actors dedicated to
the works of August Wilson, among the greatest of American playwrights. Many have played in several Wilson plays, often
in the same role. Although just beginning
its run, Fences’ cast has already come
together as a “family.” Their
performances soar, unforgettable, mining the heart of Wilson’s poetic dialogue
and the African-American experience many of us can only imagine. Here we get to viscerally walk the walk. It is enlightening and heart-wrenching.
Hayes takes the play to the very edge of Wilson’s intent,
wanting Troy’s vulnerabilities and his humanity to be on full display. There is an element of “every-man” in the universality
of the themes. He underscores the many comedic
aspects of Wilson’s first act, disarming the audience, leaving us all the more susceptible
to the dramatic fire kindling beneath that will blaze into full fury. Hayes saves his most emphatic directorial
statement until the end with a touch of magical realism but throughout, the
director’s vision coupled with his love of the play and cast is tangible and affecting.
This is no easy task as the span of the play’s eight
years is panoramic and emotionally consuming. And its main character, Troy Maxson, is a
conundrum of a character, full of tragic flaws and yet possessing traits of nobility
along with a disarming honesty. He is
larger than life, an inherently good man who has been seriously damaged by his
father, poverty, and the disadvantages of his race, and deterministically visits
the sins of the father upon his sons. In
so doing he impacts the lives of all in his orbit. And like many of us, he is wrestling with his
own mortality, symbolized by his imaginary encounters with death, building a
fence to metaphorically keep the grim reaper out.
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| Lester Purry, Karen Stephens |
Making his PBD debut, Lester Purry’s portrayal of Troy
Maxson is seismic and when he is on stage it’s as if all the oxygen is taken
out of the room by his performance, his forceful voice reaching one’s very solar
plexus. He alternates between accepting his
lot in life, assuming his responsibilities, and then helplessly allowing his
subliminal rage of victimization to rise to the surface. He is intransigent about his beliefs and can
be a terrifying bully, particularly toward his son, Cory.
It all starts with Troy’s own father who was a failed
sharecropper, tantamount to being a “free slave.” His father had one mandate for his son:
work. As Troy recalls, he had taken a 13
year old girl by a creek when he was supposed to be working. His father finds him and begins to whip Troy
with the reins from a mule. He realizes
that his father was chasing him “so he could have the gal for himself.” They fight but in the end, his father beats the
14 year old Troy senseless.
Purry delivers Wilson’s words passionately to Bono and
his son Lyons, allowing the full emotion and poetry of the author to settle
upon the audience as this hideous act is at the core of the generational family
dysfunctionality:
“When I woke up, I was laying right there by the creek,
and Blue…this old dog we had…was licking my face. I thought I was blind. I
couldn’t see nothing. Both my eyes were swollen shut. I layed there and cried….The
only thing I knew was the time had come for me to leave my daddy’s house. And
right there the world suddenly got big. And it was a long time before I could
cut it down to where I could handle it.”
In the “cutting down” period he is incarcerated for 15
years, having unintentionally committed murder during a robbery, becomes a star
baseball player in the Negro leagues afterwards, marries Rose, and becomes a
garbage man in Pittsburgh. When Troy
says “you got to take the crookeds with the straights,” it is a baseball
metaphor which has grown into how he now looks at the world and becomes his
advice to his sons. Yet there is always
the resentment that he was denied the chance to play baseball in the major
leagues, “born too early” to break the color line.
As one of the best plays of American theatre, each
character has real depth and development. Troy’s wife, Rose, is played by PBD veteran Karen
Stephens. This part was Stephens’ dream
role.
She displays her comically loving moments with a heartfelt
admiration of Troy, and even when he humiliates her, she accepts her situation.
From Wilson’s stage notes, “She
recognizes Troy’s spirit as a fine and illuminating one and she either ignores
or forgives his faults, only some of which she recognizes.”
Her performance intensifies when Troy confesses that he’s
been having an affair. In fact he’s
going to be a father. He rationalizes
that this relationship is separate from his love for Rose (implying that he’s
staying with Rose), saying this other woman makes him feel special, and that
for 18 years (with Rose) he feels like he’s “ been standing in the same place.”
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| Karen Stephens, Lester Purry |
Stephens now agonizingly tells her version of the truth: “….I’ve
been standing with you! I’ve been right here with you Troy. I got a life too. I
gave 18 years of my life to stand in the same spot with you. Don’t you think I
ever wanted other things? Don’t you think I had dreams and hopes? What about my
life? What about me…. But I held onto you Troy. I held you tighter. You was my
husband. I owe you everything I had. Every part of me I could find to give you.
And upstairs in that room with the darkness falling in on me… I gave everything
I had to try to erase the doubt that you wasn’t the finest man in the world.
And where ever you was going… I wanted to be there with you. Cause you was my
husband. Cause that’s the only way I was going to survive as your wife. You
always talking about what you give… and what you don’t have to give. But you
take too. You take… and don’t even know nobody’s giving!”
Those words, so achingly delivered by Stephens, illustrate
the poet in the playwright, some repetition to drive home themes, the rhythm
sublime.
Other than Rose, nearest to him is his sidekick, Bono, worshiping
Troy, and serving as a sounding board and Troy’s conscience. PBD’s veteran, John Archie, reprises his
recent Florida Repertory Theatre role as Bono, the best friend who articulates
the thematic heart of the play “some people build fences to keep people out and
other people build fences to keep people in. Rose wants to hold on to all of
you. She loves you. “
Archie wrings out all the emotion portraying Bono who,
towards the end of the play, comes by one last time to give Troy a loving
tip-of-the-hat to acknowledge that “[you] learned me.” By this time, Troy is a very lonely man finding
consolation in his gin.
Much of the play’s drama focuses on Troy’s relationship
with his two sons. Troy bestows his own
peculiar kind of love on the one hand and his ever present wrath on the
other. Each is caught up in his own generational
perspective, Troy’s formative years being so different than his sons. His fatherly skills rise only to the point of
wanting his sons to find “responsible work,” expecting they abandon their own
dreams. But in his heart he simply does
not want them to turn out like he did.
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| Jayla Georges, Warren Jackson |
Lyons is his older son from a previous relationship with
a woman who left Troy while he was in prison.
Warren Jackson in his PBD debut plays his part with a benign,
arms-length acceptance of his father.
There is some playful back and forth between Troy and Lyons, his son always
borrowing some money from Troy, his father holding that over his head,
admonishing him to get a real job, not as a part-time musician. Jackson conveys the absent father theme, like
a leitmotif saying “hey Pop why don’t you come on down to the grill and hear me
play?” He knows the answer will always
be an excuse and Jackson’s expressions of regret are never lost on the audience.
Troy and Rose’s biological son Cory is played by Jovon
Jacobs, his PBD debut. Jacobs just
finished a highly praised engagement as Walter Lee in New City Players' A Raisin in the Sun. He has an explosive relationship with his
father, Jacobs showing his character’s developing strength of conviction,
distain for, and then willingness finally to challenge his alpha male father. His is another bravura performance, seething
with heart hurt fury.
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| Lester Purry, Jovan Jacobs Photo by Alicia Donelan |
Cory is the depository of all his father’s shattered
dreams of sports glory, the generational violence, and Troy’s denial of Cory possibly playing football on a college sports scholarship. No, Troy insists, he must find a trade to
survive in a white man’s world, not accepting that times have changed. He demands that Cory address him as “sir.” They finally have a highly charged climactic
confrontation:
“CORY: You talking
about what you did for me…what’d you ever give me?
TROY: The feet and
bones! The pumping heart, nigger! I give you more than anybody else is ever
gonna give you.
CORY: You ain’t
never gave me nothing! You ain’t never done nothing but hold me back. Afraid I
was gonna be better than you. I used to tremble every time you called my name.
Every time I heard your footsteps in the house. Wondering all the time…what’s
Papa gonna say if I do this?...What’s he gonna say if I do that?...What’s Papa
gonna say if I turn on the radio? And Mama, too…she tries…but she’s scared of
you.”
Jacobs delivers these lines with intensity, his eyes flaring
with hatred. Cory knows a secret about
his father, his using some of the money Troy’s brother, Gabriel, gets from the
government. Upon revealing this
knowledge to his father, their verbal combat escalates into a terrifying physical
brawl, stunningly choreographed by Lee Soroko.
Uncle Gabriel, Troy’s brother, is masterly played by Bryant
Bentley, also his PBD debut although a veteran of several Wilson plays. Having suffered a mentally disabling head
injury in WW II, he is now convinced that he will play his broken Gabriel’s
trumpet to open heaven’s gates one day.
Bentley plays up the role with a moral purity and a child-like innocence
frequently foreshadowing the action.
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| Karen Stephens, Bryant Bentley, Lester Purry |
He loves Rose, usually bringing her a rose when he visits
during his many wanderings through the streets.
Gabriel is a symbol of African-American pain, his screaming incantations
at the end of the play a stake in the heart of American racism. Bentley’s performance is stirring, cutting
through to truths about how our society marginalizes people of color or those
with disabilities.
There is still another half sibling in the play, Raynell. We first see her as an innocent baby in Troy’s
arms who Rose agrees to raise after Troy’s other woman dies in childbirth, and
then as a delightful young girl at the play’s end. Raynell’s youthful innocence has a pivotal
role in helping Cory get past his blind anger as they plaintively share the
refrains of a song their father used to sing:“…I had a dog his name was Blue/You
know Blue was mighty true/You know Blue was a good old dog ….” Ultimately there is forgiveness and hope for
the future. The part of Raynell is
alternatingly played by two local elementary school actresses, Jayla Georges
and Raegan Franklin.
Scenic design is by Michael Amico who has created a
masterpiece set by capturing a slice of a downtrodden Pittsburgh neighborhood
in the 1950s. It rises on the PBD stage
as a monument to the lives that are so accurately portrayed by Wilson. There life stubbornly pushes forth from the
ashes of the past. Little patches of
grass can be seen beneath the porch, and although two buildings next to the
Maxson house are abandoned during most of the play, at the end there is life in
them and it is spring.
Resident costume designer Brian O’Keefe nostalgically recreates
the working class outfits of the economic and social station of the characters.
Rose, in particular, with her changing housedresses
and church going costumes and glorious wig recall with perfection those outfits
that live in the memory of the PBD audience.
His usual attention to detail enhances the realism of the play.
George Jackson’s lighting design bathes most of the
production in full light with an occasional dimming spot at scenes’ end. Dabbled lighting on the buildings show the
shadows of trees. His dramatic lighting
at the conclusion enriches the dramatic effect envisioned by Director Hayes.
Sound design by David Thomas focuses on realistic street
sounds stage right, a barking dog stage left, and swirling wind as the play
transits six years at the end, enhanced by musical blues riffs between scenes
as well as some traditional 1950s jazz. (Wilson himself said the blues influenced his writing
more than the work of other playwrights.) Thomas’ sound and Jackson’s lighting effects
join together to offer a consoling conclusion to this incredible piece of work.
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| James Danford |
The importance of the Stage Manager, James Danford,
cannot be overstated. The accuracy of
the endless details, from timing of costume changes to cues for the technical
crew, to the placement and movement of props between scenes depend on the split
second timing controlled by him. We
learned that Danford, at the end of this play’s run, will be retiring after
nearly 40 years and 225 shows. He will
be missed, but it is fitting that as in the case with some major leaguers, his
retirement comes at the pinnacle of his distinguished career.
With Fences
Wilson has written an ode to his protagonist,
befitting his literary beginnings as a poet. The language is rich, rhythmical, and through
the prism of the African-American experience.
PBD’s production of this great play ranks as one of its very best in
many seasons of consistent achievements.
