Playhouse Tuesdays: Fences

by erica wachs, prose reader

Bonjour! I am blogging from France, where I am currently studying abroad in a language immersion program. Next installment I will go full Francophile and probably write about The Misanthrope or some equally interesting French show (I figured it would be cliché to write about Les Miserables).

Before I left, I read a play called Fences by August Wilson. Fences is about an African American garbage man named Troy living in the 1950s. His troubled relationship with his son, and eventually his wife, when he reveals to her that he impregnanted another woman, consume the plot of this harrowing drama. I want to focus on two aspects of theshow. The first is that Fences is part of a 10-play series Wilson wrote in order to depict African American lives in every aspect of the 20th century. Wilson said that he did this in order to “offer (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans… in 'Fences' they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy's life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is affected by the same things - love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty.” He isn’t the first playwright to utilize multiple plays to tell the same or a similar story. Quiara Alegría Hudes, a more contemporary American playwright, wrote a trilogy of plays about an Iraqi war veteran, Elliot. Hudes won a Pulitzer Prize for the second play in the series, Water by the Spoonful. Similarly, Wilson won Pulitzer Prizes for Fences (1985) and The Piano Lesson (1987). What’s interesting to me is how parts of a story are given special attention with these prizes, making these elements of their stories better known, more important in the public eye. But authors are not awarded prizes based on the strength of individual chapters, so why do we hold playwrights to different standards of storytelling? Well, for one, the obvious: a completely different medium. One is performed live, while the other exists purely in the imagination. Both are meant to express the truths about the human condition. So how is it possible for playwrights to compose various series of the same story or story arc, while giving each play its own moment to flourish in front of an audience?

I think some of the answer lies in my other topic of conversation for this show, which is the bizarre character of Gabriel. Gabriel is Troy’s younger brother. An ex-soldier with severe psychological trauma, he believes he is the angel Gabriel. I think part of the experience of live theater—the act of watching a character be created before you—is how August Wilson was able to write a series of ten plays, each one different and yet harrowingly the same. It is with this eccentric character that the play goes from ordinary to unique, unable to be repeated. We do not have the luxury of reading about a psychologically damaged individual—we cannot sugar coat the experience of watching this man suffer throughout the show. We cannot help but make the connection that Cory, Troy’s son, is in the military at the end of the play, and has a chance of ending up like his uncle. We cannot help but feel the impact when we watch Gabriel’s conviction—his belief in himself is only believable to the audience when we see him onstage. Apparently, there are similarly mentally impaired characters in most of Wilson’s plays. Similar and different simultaneously.

I think it speaks to the strength of Wilson’s mission, which was to use the “power of theater as a medium where a community at large could come together to bear witness to events and currents unfolding.” In life, we don’t just have to read people, we have to interact with them. We meet people who are similar to each other and ourselves, and we cannot escape them. We cannot close the book to a certain page and pick up where we left off. No, instead we must experience each Gabriel, each Troy, each moment and each play as they come, a series of experiences that ultimately make the most compelling stories.

#playhousetuesdays #ericawachs