Fences

America has always been obsessed with Dads and their sons – dramatic clashes, often heart-tugging reconciliations, it’s such a trope throughout US theatre, screen and media.  

August Wilson’s compelling play takes up the theme in the front yard of a fraught Afro-American family in Pittsburgh in 1957.  It’s not too far from the world of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.

Troy is a city garbage collector but in his yard he’s an irrepressible raconteur, who jollies his wife, banters with his old mate Bruno and bullies his two sons, forever spurning their efforts to reach him. Bert LaBonte is charismatic as Troy, enlivening long rants of bravado and anger, and his deep resentment that racism, not his skills or age, thwarted him reaching the top leagues of baseball.

Troy berates his life-long experience of racism (while calling his peers, “niggers”), but oddly all the other, younger characters speak nothing about the racial injustices of their time in the 1950s.  August Wilson keeps his focus on the family demons – and Troy has many – but little on race and the social tensions yet to burst into the civil rights movement.

He wrote Fences in the 1980s, winning him the Pulitzer Prize, saw it later filmed with Denzel Washington – but, amazingly, only decades later, does the STC production deliver its Australian premiere.

Director Shari Sebbens does so in carefully spaced, finely modulated production, passionate but without melodrama, with perfectly cast actors at their best.  Zahra Newman is mesmerising as Troy’s resolute wife Rose, warm yet droll, with a pain to be revealed; Markus Hamilton appeals as the lanky-dog Bruno, and Troy’s long-time foil; while Dorian Nkono gives an astoundingly physical performance as Troy’s brain-damaged brother, Gabriel, who with Rose carries the hope of the play.

As for the sons, Damon Manns is the wandering musician hoping his Dad will come to his gigs or lend him another $10; and Darius Williams excels as the younger athletic Cory, always a puppy for Dad’s approval, until Troy (from jealousy) thwarts Cory’s dream to play professional football.  As in most American theatre, this intergenerational feud doesn’t end in a tearful makeup with Dad!

Fences is a conventional naturalistic play which, despite its length, grips us to the end.

It’s perfectly realised in Jeremy Allen’s alluring set of modest house and yard, littered with weeds and leaves, squeezed between warehouse walls. Allen’s costumes too are exquisite, while Verity Hampson’s painterly light constantly changes through time and moods, with composer Brendan Boney adding yet more textures.   

Fences follows the STC staging last year of the Australian premiere of another great Afro-American classic, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.  It’s another family drama, set and written in the 1950s, but with more explicit, cringing moments of discrimination. The STC and its associate director Sebbens win high praise for both premieres.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Daniel Boud