STAGE WEST: "Fences" at Old Globe Theatre

High school football player Cory (Omari K. Chancellor) confronts his father Troy Maxson (Dorian Missick) in August Wilson's "Fences."                                                                       Photo by Rich Soublet II

            It would be simple enough to regard August Wilson’s venerable “Fences” in terms of its metaphors – like the fence around Troy Maxson’s Hill District house, the one that keeps the demon away, the one that devoted wife Rose counts on to keep her wayward husband home; and the ever-presence of baseball, the lifeblood of Troy’s younger years, the nexus between his past and present; and an old ball bat itself made not of ash but of broken dreams and frustrations.
            Now that all of this is out of the way – and these metaphors are valid enough – it’s more important to appreciate that “Fences,” the sixth play about Black American life in Wilson’s famed Pittsburgh Cycle, is a work of deeply emotional human drama. It’s a depiction of family that can’t help but course through your blood and a reminder of how loving bonds, already fragile, can be complicated and undermined by the very things that make us human. One man in particular.
            As Troy Maxson himself says: “You’ve got to take the crooked with the straight.”
            The Old Globe’s production of “Fences” does beautiful service to the essence and power of “Fences.” Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, who directed a Cygnet Theatre staging of the play in 2008, has stated how she admires Wilson’s craft of language and also the complexity of his principal character. In her hands, and with an extraordinary performance by Dorian Missick as Troy, this “Fences” is the finest I’ve seen, a realization rich with those eminent words of Wilson’s and pulsing in its considerations of inter-family relationships and a man’s wrestling with himself and with his mortality.
            The son of an abusive sharecropper, 56-year-old Troy Maxson now resides in Pittsburgh with wife Rose (De’Adre Adiza) and their teen son Cory (Omari K. Chancellor). Prominent in the front yard of their house is a baseball hanging on a rope and a bat harking back to Troy’s days as a star Negro League ballplayer but also a bitter reminder that he was never given the chance to play in the Majors. Troy is now a sanitation worker, but, in another perceived slight, not yet the driver of the truck. His larger dreams behind him, he works hard, brings money home to Rose’s hand, brings his singular slice of philosophy and hardened worldview to the shadow of the house’s front porch where he regales co-worker and indulgent friend Jim Bono (Rondrell McCormick).
            Troy’s son by a first marriage, a sometimes-gigging musician named Lyons (Mister Fitzgerald), is a recurring fixture on pay day with a hand out, far from the hard worker that his father is. And there’s Troy’s brother Gabe (Donathan Walters), a veteran of WWII who was severely wounded in combat, and left mentally and psychologically damaged. Gabe is a sweet soul, and Troy cares for him, though we learn early on that the recompense Gabe received for his injury in service became Troy’s means of buying the house in the Hill District.
            That there is so much to contextualize in “Fences” is a testament to its real-life cogency: How intricate, how untidy are the lives of not only the working-class poor, of not only the African Americans about whom Wilson writes, but when it comes to relationships with those in our circle, of us all?
            Hovering over these realities, too, is the same mortality that stares down Troy Maxson, he who defies it as would a stubborn batter braced for “a fastball on the outside corner”?
            Meanwhile, the curve balls in Troy’s mortal life are onerous ones. Son Cory, a high school football player, may be offered a college scholarship -- Troy wants him to work at the A&P, to work hard as he does, to not care about being liked by him or to be like him. Though Rose is as loving and understanding as the wife of a difficult man could be, Troy is straying, and that straying will upset the foundation of their relationship, and of their household.
            The highly charged scenes between Missick and Aziza that ensue are as potent as dramatic theater can get. From that point on, the denouement of “Fences” seems preordained, and it will be one that is hypertense and tender at once.
            Missick and Aziza are supported by an exceptional cast, with Chancellor at the forefront as a young man standing up to an uncompromising father and standing up for an anxious loving mother. McCormick brings likability and no end of common-sense wisdom to Jim Bono, and Walters’ erratic but devil-chasing Gabe is heart rending. It is he who will lead us to the conclusion.
            The set designed by Lawrence E. Moten III at the Globe is the Maxson world as conceived by Wilson down to its tiniest detail, with that front porch being the open door into what Rose has tried to create, even in the face of the harshest truths and most painful disappointments. It is still a home, a base, somewhere that love seeks to prevail.
            It’s shattering in a family when love isn’t enough, when fences alone are unable to contain its preciousness or to keep at bay the forces and the failures that threaten it. That love can survive is more than the demon can abide and, always, our own comfort and salvation.
            “Fences” runs through May 3 at the Old Globe in Balboa Park.