Fences

by August Wilson

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

An infinitely approachable narrative grappling with the ongoing issue of race in America. It’s the story of one man, living in the heart of a changing America as the Civil Rights movement sets in. This is the play that launched August Wilson, and you’ll see why when you read it.

Drama / 5m 2f / 1 SetWinner of the New York Drama Critic's and Tony Awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize this sensational drama starred James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson a former star of the Negro baseball leagues who now works as a garbage man in 1957 Pittsburgh. Excluded as a Negro from the major leagues during his prime Troy's bitterness takes it's toll on his relationships with both his wife and son who now wants his own chance to play. "One of the great characters in American drama."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780573619052
Publisher:	Concord Theatricals
Publication date:	02/05/2010
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	98
Sales rank:	814,028
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	NP (what's this?)

About the Author

August Wilson was a major American playwright whose work has been consistently acclaimed as among the finest of the American theater. His first play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best new play of 1984-85. His second play, Fences, won numerous awards for best play of the year, 1987, including the Tony Award, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Joe Turner's Come and Gone, his third play, was voted best play of 1987-1988 by the New York Drama Critics' Circle. In 1990, Wilson was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson. He died in 2005.

Editorial Reviews

"There are only fences"

Troy Maxson is an angry man. He is an embittered ex-con who has built inner fences around his emotions that no one—neither his son Gory, his wife, Rosa Lee, nor his best friend, Jim—can cross. A proud and bitter man who was prevented by racism from playing major league baseball, Maxson is at fifty- three years of age a garbage collector. While his job allows him to successfully provide for his family, handling garbage represents for him a grim metaphor of his life. As he did during a bit in prison, he once again feels confined, and those who love him most, who depend on him most, suffer most for it.

Through Troy Maxson, playwright August Wilson personifies the man who grew up during the heat of Jim Crow: first proud, hopeful, and passionate in expectation; then emotionally withdrawn and disillusioned from incessant battles with life. Wilson also masterfully illuminates both the strength that lies within community and the adverse impact of a psychology of inequality that devastates the African American male and, in turn, his family and relationships, potentially disintegrating that same community.

Wilson's Pulitzer Prize—winning play offers a bleak picture of what happens to black males when their aspirations go beyond the fences within which they are confined. The fences of a racist society are compounded by the fences black men have often created to ward off loved ones who remind them of their failures. These fences only harbor. pain and hasten an inevitable asphyxiation. Fences is a gripping portrait of a black man dying.

Sacred Fire

"The strongest, most passionate American dramatic writing since Tennessee Williams."—The New York Post

"Fences leaves no doubt that Mr. Wilson is a major writer, combining a poet's ear for vernacular with a robust sense of humor, a sure sense for crackling dramatic incident, and a passionate commitment to a great subject."—The New York Times

"A blockbuster piece of theater, a major American play."—New York Daily News

"An eloquent play... a comedy-drama that is well-nigh flawless."—New York Magazine

"A moving story line and a hero almost Shakespearian in contour."—The Wall Street Journal

"A work of tremendous impact that summons up gratitude for the beauty of its language, the truth of its character, the power of its portrayals."—Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher