August Wilson’s play has lost none of its power, with striking parallels between apartheid as an oppressive system of white minority rule and the US before civil rights.
Wilson’s work continues to compel audiences not simply through its imaginative power, but because its rounded insider’s perspective makes ordinary African-Americans sympathetically visible as they love and struggle. These are lives otherwise overlooked by an indifferent white community.in Johannesburg will vividly bring to mind the destructive after-effects of apartheid on black life. Beyond this, Wilson’s drama aims to touch deep human responses in all of us.
The title of the play maps the contours of a conflicted world whose inhabitants strive both for security and release. Literally, Troy Maxson is building a fence around his property; fences protect and enclose, but also shut out. Figuratively, “fences” suggests the barriers inhibiting personal relationships and the obstructions deliberately imposed by racial segregation. Troy dares death to try to abduct those he loves by crossing his fence.
For Wilson, the music of the blues traverses the mood and texture of African-American existence from the time of the slave ships through to modern life. As the African-American writer Ralph Ellison poetically expresses it: “The blues is an impulse to keep the details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it…”Fences
The parallels between apartheid as an oppressive system of white minority rule and the US before civil rights are striking. Troy Maxson’s ample personality strains against such a structure of shrunken opportunities for his roiling energy. So his frustration turns back on itself, poisoning his manhood and steadily damaging his family relationships.
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