![]() A haunting presence throughout the play is Troy’s older brother, Gabriel (Manny Buckley), who was seriously brain-damaged as a soldier in World War II, and whose reparations from the government paid for the Maxsons’ house in which he had a room for many years. But his father - more envious and bitter than concerned - undermines this opportunity, and Cory, furious and defeated, joins the Marines.Īnd that is not all. When he asks his father for a loan of $10, he is immediately turned down.Ĭory (Ajax Dontavius), Troy’s son with Rose, is an intense young high school senior and gifted athlete who is aiming for a chance to win a college football scholarship at a time when color barriers were beginning to come down. He is a striving but penniless musician backed by a girlfriend with a job. Lyons (William Anthony Sebastian Rose II), his child from a previous marriage. His second marriage to Rose (Shanesia Davis), has endured for nearly two decades thanks to her being an indestructible force with a generous heart who tries to keep peace in the family. He dreamed of being a major league player before Blacks were accepted into its ranks, served some time in prison, and for many years has worked for the city’s sanitation department. Troy Maxson (Kamal Angelo Bolden), a man in his 50s who, as a young man, excelled in the Negro Baseball League. And here, staged in an ideally intimate space in the Theater Wit complex - with several long rows of seats on either side of the stage, and tall, fragmented wood-paneled walls at either end of the room that suggest the towering fence that is never quite completed - the emotional intensity is fully palpable.Īt the center of “Fences” is a husband and wife. They turn Wilson’s words into what is almost the verbal equivalent of operatic arias.įull of resentment, pain, rage, broken dreams, endurance and yes, love, Wilson’s characters are at once achingly real and larger than life. ![]() In addition, this riveting production also serves as a powerful reminder of the many electrifying actors at work in Chicago - actors who can grab hold of Wilson’s writing, and soar on the playwright’s most feverish and challenging passages. ![]() And, along the way, Wilson subtly presages the more overtly revolutionary era that will unfold in the 1960s. Then, in May, there was “Two Trains Running,” Ron OJ Parson’s vivid rendering of Wilson’s 1960s era installment produced by Court Theatre.Īnd now, for American Blues Theater, director Monty Cole and his uniformly breathtaking cast has created a blistering production of “Fences,” Wilson’s family drama set in the late 1950s.Ī painfully honest look at the relationship between a husband and wife, and a father and his two sons, the play captures a sense of the generational turmoil in one Pittsburgh family. First came director Chuck Smith’s searing revival of “Gem of the Ocean,” the series’ origin story, produced by the Goodman Theatre this past February.
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