Fences

by August Wilson, Samuel G. Freedman (Foreword by)

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.

A powerful, stunning dramatic work that won Wilson critical acclaim and the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and Black was to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But now, the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s This spirit is changing the world Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, adnd it's making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less…

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Samuel G. Freedman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781559363020
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	04/01/2008
Series:	August Wilson's Century Cycle , #6
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

August Wilson (1945–2005) is the most influential and successful African American playwright. A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author, his plays have been produced all over the world.

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the man who grew up during the heat of Jim Crow: first proud, hopeful, and passionate in expectation; then emotionally withdrawn and disillusioned from incessant battles with life.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