August Wilson's "Fences' in New York

The trouble with movie stars is that audiences love them. So when a big movie star— Denzel Washington, in this case— plays an often-unlikable character— Troy Maxson in this case— the audience, having come to see the star rather than the play, is determined to love the character regardless.

This makes for a very odd experience of Fences, a serious and often-grim drama that the audience (at least the one I was part of) seems to have decided is a sit-com. Or maybe a talk show where life crises are played for cheap amusement.

Fences is #5 in August Wilson's "Century Cycle," the remarkable 24-year project that he completed shortly before his untimely death in 2005: Wilson wrote ten plays, each representing a decade in the African-American experience in the 20th Century. Taken in the chronological order of their content (rather than the order of their composition), the plays create an interesting and important history of black America through Wilson's representative characters in ordinary neighborhoods.

With only one exception (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, soon to open at Philadelphia Theatre Company), the plays all take place in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where Wilson grew up, which is where we meet Troy in his backyard in 1957. We can see into the kitchen through the porch windows; the excellent set, designed by Santo Loquasto and lit by Brian MacDevitt's atmospheric lighting, evokes a world of just getting by.

Youth pays the price

Troy works on a trash truck, illiterate but proud and often prickly, a blowhard and a windbag and a charmer. His wife Rose (the luminous, moving Viola Davis) is a devoted helpmeet and mother to their teenage son Cory (Chris Chalk), who is intimidated by his unloving and stern father. The central and iconic dramatic conflict occurs, predictably, between father and son; youth will triumph but, as always, at a terrible price.

We will learn about Troy's own brutal father, and his escape from the rural South into the unwelcoming North, where he met and married and fathered a child and supported his family by stealing. Eventually he killed a man and spent years in prison, where he learned to play baseball with still-legendary skill.

His passion for baseball and his passionate resentment of the white establishment that he thinks held him back is the central fact of his life. Although Rose points out that times have changed and that by the time he got out of prison he was too old to play professional ball anyway, Troy won't back down from the sense of injustice that fuels his life with outrage.

Oedipus in Pittsburgh

So when Cory is recruited to play college football, the battle begins. When Cory finds Troy sitting on the top step of the porch, he tries to get by and delivers the resonant line: "You in my way." Thus was it ever, from Oedipus to the present.

The battle with Lyons (Russel Hornsby), Troy's older son by his first wife, is ongoing, filled with rights and wrongs on both sides. Troy's friend Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson) provides Troy with the admiring follower he needs. Troy's brother, Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), damaged beyond repair by World War II, has been exploited not only by his country but also by his brother.

Deranged Gabriel blows his silent trumpet, and the play ends with what Wilson's stage directions call Gabriel's "dance of atavistic signature and ritual" and howling song. This production's Gabriel seems just a weird and sad man, lacking that powerful mystical/spiritual component that's crucial to all of Wilson's plays.

Crowd-pleasing

This lack seems typical of Kenny Leon's direction. Wilson's complex realism is transformed into a crowd-pleasing show; the sexy talk is heightened, and the audience laps it up. Washington is a tense, plausibly athletic Troy, with much macho posturing. To their credit, both he and Viola Davis honor the play sufficiently to talk through the audience's raucous laughter or applause without pausing as they would in a comedy, which this most definitely is not.

(An odd sidelight on audiences: When Fences was performed in Uganda several years ago, it caused considerable controversy, as American and African ideas of father-son relationships collided when Cory dared to physically challenge his father. Later, when Rose rejects her philandering husband, all the women in the Ugandan audience ululated. Another odd and moving sidelight, underscoring the universality of the play's themes of generational clashes: In 1997, Fences was performed in Beijing with an all- Chinese cast; not one actor spoke English, had ever been to America or had ever met an African American. The production was a huge popular success, with people riding bicycles 90 minutes to reach the theater.)

By the time Fences is over, every character is fenced in, institutionalized: Gabe in the hospital, Lyons in the workhouse, Cory in the Marines, Rose in the church. It's 1965 and the world is changing: We know, although the characters never mention, that Nat King Cole and Malcolm X die that year, and, for the first time in Major League Baseball history, every Most valuable Player was black. And so we're ready for Two Trains Running, Wilson's next look at the 20th Century.