FENCES by August Wilson—Laguna Playhouse
- TheShowReport
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Rich and full of depth, consummately believable in its exquisite contradictions.
MAY 8, 2025—LAGUNA BEACH
In 1984’s ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' the playwright August Wilson (well-known for exploring the heritage and experience of African-Americans over the course of the twentieth century) took us into a Chicago band room in the late 20’s, where black musicians channeled a heritage of unspeakable suffering into beautiful blues music, and, on occasion, eruptions of self-destructive rage.
In FENCES, the Wilson play written the following year, the setting is again the North, this time urban industrial Pittsburgh, and the characters are again transplanted blacks from the South, some of whom tote musical instruments. But now the year is 1957, and this time the horns remain silent. For the slum dwellers of FENCES, scraping out a hard-scrabble existence amid the Eisenhower boom, there is nothing to sing about. There is only the rage, bottled up and festering, waiting for release in a cataclysm still to come.
That violent social upheaval would arrive in the 1960's riots that set America's unofficially segregated Northern cities aflame. FENCES is pointedly set on the deceptively quiet eve of that catharsis — and, as befits its historical moment, its tone is anxious and edgy — like a kettle about to blow. Although the ghetto family at center stage, the Maxsons, will inevitably be swept up in the ensuing conflagration, the anger percolating within their household has yet to boil over into the world beyond.
Mr. Wilson's Tony and Pulitzer award-winning masterpiece is always absorbing when giving that anger full vent. The work's protagonist — and grandest creation — is a Vesuvius of rage played by Corey Jones in top form. Mr. Jones is the tyrannical family patriarch, a 53-year-old garbage man named Troy — and, a leftover of history. Once a mighty Negro league ballplayer who hit home runs off Satchel Paige, Troy was too old to move into the major leagues by the time Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Now Troy is as embittered at blacks, in and outside his family, as he is at the white America that robbed him of his rightful due.
Troy is especially contemptuous of his 17-year-old son, Cory (K.J. Powell), a promising athlete being recruited by a collegiate football team. Although Cory's ambitions are the same as Troy's once were, the father cruelly derails his son's attempts to emulate him. He wants Cory to pursue more easily marketable job skills instead, like the local A&P. But, in his stubborn effort to prevent his own harsh history from repeating itself with his child, Troy is blind to the fact that history is changing. Poisoned by his past, he needlessly inflicts that legacy on a son whose dreams of a better life are not necessarily destined for the garbage heap.
Lyons (Sean Samuels), Troy's oldest son, fathered before Troy's time in jail with a woman he met before he became a baseball player, is an ambitious and talented jazz musician. He grew up without Troy for most of his childhood because Troy was in prison. Lyons has a hard time making a living and depends on his girlfriend, Bonnie (whom we never see on stage), and handouts from Rose and Troy. Lyons' jazz playing appears to Troy as an unconventional and foolish occupation, calling it “Chinese music.” Lyons is 34 and an adult, but his father still treats him as a child.
Yet, as monstrous and misdirected as Troy's anger is, it somehow does not seem irrational. It's Mr. Wilson's writing skill in this play that makes us understand the father's behavior without ever sentimentalizing him. The facts of Troy's life tell all, and they are laid out memorably late in Act I. In a gripping speech of ''walking blues,'' the father takes us along every step of his long, tortuous migration to the North - a road that stretched from an impoverished Southern farm through the slums of post-World War I, and a jail cell.
Mr. Jones delivers the monologue with a mixture of humor, spiritual exhaustion and smarting pain that seems to be the last gasp of a generation of a frustrating social status.
There are additional potent passages in FENCES as well, particularly when the other innocent victims of Troy's bitterness, notably his long-suffering wife (Tamarra Graham), rises to challenge him. Yet the play doesn't always rise to the stature of its subject. Troy's relatives often feel like satellites, sounding more like stock replicas of other paradigmatic family plays, especially bringing to mind Arthur Miller's.
FENCES is, however, a technically superior and better crafted work of art than most other plays. It has an elaborate plot to go with its studiously conceived metaphors and symbols (from the titular fences to a half-witted, trumpet-wielding prophet named Gabriel, played by Matt Orduna). The dialogue fully opens up its speakers' hearts with the lines making subtle and omniscient authorial points. And the scenes seem designed to convey melodramatic story twists, charting the characters with various subplots, conclusions and resolutions some indirectly fulfilled. For instance, the crucial process by which Cory and the others reconcile themselves with their father — and retrieve the pride he lost — is decreed in the play's affecting coda, rather than dramatized along the way.
The fence referred to by the play's title is built over many years and is revealed to be Troy’s conceptualization as a truism to keep the Grim Reaper away. The fence is also symbolic of the emotional barrier that Troy erected between himself and his sons, one from each of his adult relationships.
The passages in which Mr. Wilson unleashes his forces of humor, poetry and social observation are juicily set forth by the cast. Mr. Jones serves up a bone-rattling monologue about a mystical encounter with Satan and, conversely, a light-hearted confessional about his liberating extramarital adventures. Alberta (who is never seen in the play) is a fantasy for Troy, but that fantasy comes crashing down when Alberta becomes pregnant, and Troy’s affair is exposed. When Alberta dies in childbirth and their daughter Raynell (Amari McCoy) is left motherless, Troy begs Rose to take in Raynell as her own daughter.
After Troy’s death, the young Raynell’s innocent perception of her father prompts Cory to remember the more appealing and even lovable aspects of Troy, such as his fantastic tall tales and songs. Ms. McCoy’s Raynell and Cory bond over the remembrance of their complex, tragic father, recognizing he was a product of a brutal and racist era. Raynell and Cory’s brief moment of shared grief and love hints at the potential for healing within the Maxson family.
Mr. Orduna’s Gabriel could potentially be an allegory to salvation. Other than being actually named Gabriel, like the angel, Gabe wears a trumpet, constantly chases away unseen "hellhounds", and regularly believes himself to be speaking with Saint Peter. At the end, just before Troy's funeral, the family gathers around Gabe in the yard. He blows three times into his trumpet, but no sound comes out. In a moment of trance, Gabe begins to dance and sing. The sun breaks through the clouds while the family looks on. Troy is at last delivered and the rest of the family is too; each seeming to find peace in their relationship with Troy.
The production set design by Edward Haynes Jr. is a work of art, surrounding the Maxsons' tenement with the hellish smokestack urbanscape beyond, and Donny Jackson’s lighting, like the play's finest moments, perfectly captures that inky, almost imperceptibly agitated darkness that fell over a nation's cities in the years just before the fences of racism, for a time, came crashing down.
LAGUNA PLAYHOUSE PRESENTS: AUGUST WILSON’S FENCES; Directed by YVETTE FREEMAN HARTLEY; Scenic Design by EDWARD HAYNES JR; Costume Design by DANA REBECCA WOODS; Lighting Design by DONNY JACKSON; Sound Design by JESSE WORLEY; Original Music Composition by LANNY HARTLEY; Casting by MICHAEL DONOVAN CSA & RICHIE FERRIS CSA; Props Design by KEVIN WILLIAMS; Wig Design by DANIELLE RICHTER; Fight Coordinator is MARC ANTONIO PRITCHETT; Production Stage Manager is NATALIE FIGAREDO.
CAST: TAMARRA GRAHAM Tamarra Graham (“Bee-Luther-Hatchee;” “Pure Confidence”) as Rose Maxson; BOISE HOLMES (Broadway; “Wicked;” “Once On This Island”) as Jim Bono; COREY JONES (“A Few Good Men” at La Mirada Theatre; “The Color Purple” at Celebration Theatre) as Troy Maxson; AMARI MCCOY (“9-1-1;” “Frasier”) as Raynell Maxson; MATT ORDUNA (Laguna Playhouse debut) as Gabriel; K.J. POWELL (“Double V” at ICT; “Farragut North” at Theatre 68) as Cory Maxson; and SEAN SAMUELS (“Cabaret” at 5-Star Theatricals; “Quantum Leap”) as Lyons Maxson.
FENCES by AUGUST WILSON plays from April 30th through May 18th, 2025 at 606 Laguna Canyon Road in Laguna Beach. Performances are Wednesdays at 7:30pm; Thursdays at 2:00pm and 7:30pm; Fridays at 7:30pm; Saturdays at 2:00pm & 7:30pm; Sundays at 1:00pm & 5:30pm. For tickets, visit www.lagunaplayhouse.com.
CHRIS DANIELS
Arts & Entertainment Reviewer
The Show Report
PHOTO CREDIT: Jason Niedle/TETHOS
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