Righteous In His Own Backyard

By William A. Henry III +

August Wilson's first commercially produced work, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, ran more than eight months on Broadway, won the 1985 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play and marked the emergence of a substantial new voice for the American theater. A self-taught man who dropped out of school in the ninth grade, Wilson, 41, announced ambitions for a cycle of ten plays meant to reveal black life in each decade of this century. Ma Rainey depicted the self- imposed racial isolation of a 1920s blues singer. His second play to reach Broadway, Fences, which opened last week, portrays the frustration of a former Negro-leagues baseball player in the industrial North of the 1950s, a boom time that is passing this man by. Too old to make the move to the majors, too much a country boy to seek an education and get ahead, too embittered to believe in the hope the civil rights movement is beginning to offer, Garbage Man Troy Maxson is vividly particular, but, as intended, he reflects the tragedy of a generation.

Wilson's greatest gift is his ability to make sense of anger: he writes naturalistic scenes of genial humor turning into an explosive violence that flows from his characters and from the warping effect racism has had upon them. Humiliated in the larger world, these people fiercely guard their dignity close to home. Defeated by enemies too distant to see, they lash out at their own kind -- a colleague in Ma Rainey, a son in Fences. These confrontations can seem like old-fashioned melodrama in comparison with the plotless minimalism now in vogue. But Wilson has the weight of history on his side. If Troy Maxson turns tyrant, betraying his wife with a younger woman and blasting his son's chances for an athletic scholarship to college, his demand for autocratic power is understandable, almost forgivable, in the context of his decades down South during the era of Jim Crow.

In performance, much of the play's power comes from James Earl Jones, who has not had a part so well suited to his prodigious talents since The Great White Hope won him a Tony Award in 1969. The show originated in April 1985 at the Yale Repertory Theater, staged then as now by Y.R.T. Artistic Director Lloyd Richards. As his interpretation has ripened, Jones has found not only Troy Maxson's destructive fury but also his belly-shaking laughter, his lyric love of tall tales, his quicksilver charm, his stoic sense of duty and honor. & He manages to be at once real and of mythic proportions. The cast around him is also adroit, notably Mary Alice as his long-suffering but ultimately assertive wife, Ray Aranha as his best friend, and Frankie R. Faison, both funny and affecting as Troy's brother, brain damaged in combat during World War II.

At times Wilson asks too much: not even Jones can make this man, so cool and competitive toward his sons, believably ecstatic at word that he is "gonna be somebody's daddy" by an unseen mistress. And it is unlikely that he and his wife, so eager for respectability, would debate this news in the backyard, with neighbors' windows a dozen feet away. Nonetheless, in craftsmanship, poignance and lingering impact, Fences represents a major step forward for Wilson. In the decade or so since the emergence of David Mamet, the American stage has not heard so impassioned and authentic a new voice.