Fences

Presented through Oct. 12 in Poag Auditorium, Tennessee State Univ.

Tickets avail. through Ticketmaster, 255-9600 or www.ticketmaster.com

With recent events, we have painfully witnessed the destruction of meaningful American architectural symbols. So it’s important to consciously focus on positive, constructive matters in our arts community. Over at Tennessee State University, crews are busily at work erecting what will be TSU’s new Performing Arts Center, which will by next year offer state-of-the-art technical facilities for theater, dance, and music. In the meantime, venerable old Poag Auditorium is still the place to be, where this week the university’s fledgling professional theater company in residence, The American Negro Playwright Theatre (ANPT), will unveil a new production of August Wilson’s Fences.

After opening on Broadway in 1987, Fences garnered a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, an American Theater Critics’ Association Award, a Drama Desk Award, and an Outer Critics’ Circle Award. Not since the plays of Lorraine Hansberry in the 1960s had a work written by an African American received such universal acclaim, not to mention unprecedented commercial success. James Earl Jones won a Tony himself that year for his powerful portrayal of Wilson’s lead character, frustrated ex-baseball player Troy Maxson.

The ANPT production has another gifted actor in the role, Nashville’s own Barry Scott, who heads a cast of seven—including top-flight locals Jeff Carr and TSU drama instructor Kimberley LaMarque—under the guidance of well-known actor/writer/director John Henry Redwood. Redwood himself has played Troy Maxson in 10 productions nationwide.

“I’ve learned so much about the play, and even about the character that I had performed, by directing it,” says Redwood, a gentleman of impressive stature with a rich baritone voice. “Here I’m concerned with all the characters and how they come together in the play and function within the world Mr. Wilson has created. All the cast members bring with them so much. People think that plays, once they’re performed by, say, James Earl Jones, that those performances become definitive, but that’s not the case. Any time a new actor performs a role, they are giving that role their particular life, and it’s a new creation from the beginning. I’m seeing a lot of new creation here that I haven’t seen before.”

If Scott, who also serves as ANPT’s artistic director, harbored any reservations about performing his role under Redwood’s watchful eye, they’ve been quickly dispelled. “John’s a good fit for me and the company,” Scott says. “I’m familiar with how he directs. I see myself in John. I thought he might have problems because he’d performed so many productions of this play, yet he’s always reminding us that his role as a director is not as a traffic cop. You create your own invention, your own interpretation. He has allowed me to relax and to trust from his experience in the role and to draw on my own instincts as well. It’s been a good collaboration. It’s the way I like to work.”

Wilson’s protagonist Maxson, in his early 50s, is a hardworking garbage collector living in Pittsburgh in 1957. An excellent baseball player in his youth, he was prevented from playing in the major leagues because of the ban on black athletes. By the time Jackie Robinson broke the “color barrier” in 1947, Maxson was past his ball-playing prime. Though embittered, he’s a responsible man who has worked very hard for his home and family. Now his second son, Cory, a gifted athlete, wants to attend college on a sports scholarship. Troy is strongly opposed to the idea because he claims Cory will only end up disappointed. He feels Cory should be practical and learn a trade so that he can support himself. As father and son struggle over the issue, “fences” are erected.

Despite its more obvious black-oriented themes such as “dreams deferred” and racism, Fences also includes images of family life and intimate connections to which audiences—black or white—can relate. Nevertheless, the play is a distinct August Wilson creation, never straying from its primary intention of telling the story of an African American family that deals with issues that pertain to the black community. Fences does not attempt to gain universal appeal by telling a universal story; it strives to incorporate the dreams of African Americans in the 1950s into U.S. history.

“The African American plays of the ’60s and ’70s were written out of anger,” says Redwood. “But Fences is a play that speaks to the real lives of African Americans, without having to be concerned with ‘get whitey.’ This is our story. We look upon the stage and see ourselves and our parents up there—we hear our stories and we hear our music—and I think white audiences have found that they can come to the theater and sit and learn something about black people and how they interact with each other.”

For Scott, it is important that audiences see the broader aspects of not only Wilson’s accessible work, but also the company’s goals to reach the wider Nashville audience. In his view, there are fences to be jumped both within and without the play.

“In the hands of a skilled director,” he says, “this play gives an audience an opportunity to see beyond the blackness. These people are from the South, and there is a rural kind of feel you get from the household and their rituals. But beyond that, you see the human condition: the fear that a child has without having a mother; the anxiety that a teenager feels about being out in the world alone; the expectations that a father has for his son; the faith that a wife has in her husband. It is refreshing for white audiences in a special way. And for black audiences, they can revisit their roots or be introduced to the history of people who have migrated from the South. Wilson has laid out an opportunity for us to get beyond the blackness in a play that doesn’t rant about discrimination.”

With the exception of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, performed at Circle Players two seasons ago, Nashvillians have had scant opportunity to view Wilson’s prize-winning works. In Fences, perhaps more so than his other plays, the playwright draws upon traditional visions of the American dream, offering an emotional, poignant critique of the space that the dream has for black Americans. By telling the Maxsons’ story and making their endurance known, Wilson attempts to dismantle some of the racial fences surrounding blacks, giving them a presence and a voice within American history.

There can probably be no better play to inaugurate ANPT’s groundbreaking start-up at TSU. With a talented cast and a distinguished director at the helm, this production spearheads Scott’s ambitious program to establish a new professional theater for the enrichment of Nashville audiences and, at the same time, provide a resource for the university.

“Here, our students will get an opportunity to observe professionals at work,” he says. “For now, ANPT will raise money for one production a year, using a guest artist contract with Actors Equity. Later, we want to move to two shows a year. We are a professional black theater company, one of only a handful in the country. It’s been a formidable task, but we are committed to our plans and to our growth.”

No problem: just one more fence to jump.