Gale - A Study Guide for August Wilsons Fences

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August Wilson

1983

The first staged reading of August Wilsons play Fences occurred in 1983 at the Eugene ONeill Theatre Centers National Playwrights Conference. Wilsons drama opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985 and on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre in 1987. Fences was well-received, winning four Antionette (Tony) Perry Awards, including best play. The work also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the John Gassner Outer Critics Circle Award. Wilson was also selected as Artist of the Year by the Chicago Tribune.

Fences was a huge success with both critics and viewers, and it drew black audiences to the theatre in much larger numbers than usual. Because the play had four years of pre-production development before it opened on Broadway, Wilson had a chance to tighten and revise the action, watching his characters mature into lifelike creations. James Earl Jones played the role of Troy in the first staging of Fences on Broadway. Jonesand many black audience membersrecognized and identified with Wilsons use of language to define his black characters. In an interview with Heather Henderson in Theater, Jones stated that Few writers can capture dialect as dialogue in a manner as interesting and accurate as Augusts.

Reviewers also noted Wilsons ability to create believable characters. In his review for Newsweek, Allan Wallach noted that it is the men who dominate the script and bring it to lifesingling out Jones, whom Wallach noted, is at his best in the bouts of drinking and bantering. It is Joness performance that creates a rich portrait of a man who scaled down his dreams to fit inside his run-down yard. Clive Barnes, writing for the New York Post, said that Wilson provides the strongest, most passionate American dramatic writing since Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Fences, said Barnes, gave me one of the richest experiences I have ever had in the theater.

August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel, on April 27, 1945, in a ghetto area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, known as The Hill. Wilsons white father, a German baker named August Kittel, abandoned the family when Wilson was a child. Wilsons mother, Daisy Wilson Kittel, worked as a cleaning woman to raise her six children. Later, after Wilsons mother had remarried, his stepfather moved the family to a white neighborhood where Wilson was subjected to unbridled racism. At age 15, Wilson dropped out of school after being falsely accused of plagiarism; after that episode, he continued his education on his own, with periods of extensive reading at the public library.

Wilson began his career writing poetry and short stories but switched to drama in 1978 when he was invited to write plays for a black theatre in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Several fellowships enabled Wilson to concentrate on writing plays as a fulltime venture. Although his early efforts, Fullerton Street (1980), Black Bart and the Sacred Hills (1981), and Jitney (1982) received little attention, he gained recognition with his 1984 play, Ma Raineys Black Bottom, which was accepted for a staged reading at the Eugene ONeill Theatre Centers National Playwrights Conference in 1982. The following year, Fences was also presented at the ONeill conference and in 1986 Joe Turners Come and Gone became Wilsons third play to be produced at the conference.

Each of these plays followed their initial readings at the ONeill with productions at the Yale Repertory Theatre and later stagings on Broadway. In 1987, The Piano Lesson opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre; Two Trains Running followed three years later. Wilsons