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Fences, which opened Thursday, Jan. 12, was Wilson’s second play to go to Broadway. His singular achievement and literary legacy is a cycle of ten plays, each set in a different decade, depicting the comedy and tragedy of the African-American experience in the 20th century. Fences is his play on being black in the 1950s.
The first staged reading of August Wilson's play Fences occurred in 1983 at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's National Playwright's Conference. Wilson's drama opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985 and on Broadway at the 46th Street Theatre in 1987. Fences was well-received, winning four Antionette ("Tony") Perry Awards, including best play. The work also won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the John Gassner Outer Critics' Circle Award. Wilson was also selected as Artist of the Year by the Chicago Tribune.
Fences was a huge success with both critics and viewers, and it drew black audiences to the theatre in much larger numbers than usual. Because the play had four years of pre-production development before it opened on Broadway, Wilson had a chance to tighten and revise the action, watching his characters mature into lifelike creations. James Earl Jones played the role of Troy in the first staging of Fences on Broadway. Jones—and many black audience members—recognized and identified with Wilson's use of language to define his black characters. In an interview with Heather Henderson in Theater, Jones stated that "Few writers can capture dialect as dialogue in a manner as interesting and accurate as August's."
Reviewers also noted Wilson's ability to create believable characters. In his review for Newsweek, Allan Wallach noted that it is the men who dominate the script and bring it to life—singling out Jones, whom Wallach noted, is at his best "in the bouts of drinking and bantering." It is Jones's performance that creates "a rich portrait of a man who scaled down his dreams to fit inside his run-down yard." Clive Barnes, writing for the New York Post, said that Wilson provides "the strongest, most passionate American dramatic writing since Tennessee Williams" (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Fences, said Barnes, "gave me one of the richest experiences I have ever had in the theater."
Beginning in 1957, between the Korean and Vietnam wars, Fences ends in 1965, but the themes of the play place it squarely in a pre-civil-rights era, pre-Vietnam War society. The story is set during the season Hank Aaron led the Milwaukee Braves to the World Series.
Troy, a former Negro League baseball player, too old to play by the time the major leagues finally integrated, is a bitter garbage collector. The son of a southern sharecropper, Troy moved north to Pittsburgh during the Great Migration, but never really found the land of opportunity he imagined. A story of dreams lost, racism, family struggles, infidelity, work, marriage, violence, mental illness and the suffering of war veterans, Fences is a “meaty, timely” story that holds a lot of parallels to contemporary American society, said Ron OJ Parson, director of Court Theatre’s production.