FROM THE PUBLISHER

The author of the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play, MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, returns with another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him new critical acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist of FENCES, Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be - to survive. For Troy 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... a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can...a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less...

FROM THE CRITICS

Sacred Fire

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the man who grew up during the heat of Jim Crow: first proud, hopeful, and passionate in expectation; then emotionally withdrawn and disillusioned from incessant battles with life.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