Breaking down ‘Fences’

INSIDE a vacant former furniture store, former Negro League baseball player Troy Maxson wrestles with his betrayal of his wife, Rose -- and silently but equally powerfully, with the emotional fallout from generations of racism and inequity.

In this simple but magical room, on a platform filled with the detritus of a hardscrabble existence and dreams deferred, some of the finest African American artists of their generation are melding passion and craft, breathing life into a vibrant piece of living history.

They are rehearsing August Wilson’s Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning “Fences,” a play that changed the American theater. Starring Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett, and directed by Sheldon Epps, the production opens Friday at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Set in 1957 Pittsburgh, “Fences” transformed the theatrical landscape not only artistically but also in the way plays are produced and presented. Of the 10-play decade-by-decade Wilson canon, it remains his “landmark” play, the one that has been and still is most produced, most awarded and, in short, the one that made the greatest and most lasting imprint on the American theater.

“ ‘Fences’ is his most ‘commercial’ because it’s his simplest, his easiest to follow,” says Courtney B. Vance, who played Rose and Troy’s son, Cory, in the original cast at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985 and on Broadway in 1987. “It’s an American drama.”

“I think it is one of the best-written of Wilson’s plays,” adds Epps, who is also the artistic director of the Playhouse. “It is one of the most focused and one of the most clearly emotionally driven of the canon. It is clearly and cleanly about what is going on in the relationships of that family.”

What makes this Pasadena revival particularly poignant is not only the starry cast, but the timing. The three men responsible for the “Fences” revolution -- Wilson, director Lloyd Richards and producer Benjamin Mordecai -- have all died recently, marking the end of an era. Richards died of heart failure last month on his 87th birthday. He was preceded by his 60-year-old protege Wilson, who died of cancer in October, and Mordecai in May 2005, also of cancer at age 60.

*

Rise of the regional network

THE quiet revolution began in the early 1980s, when Wilson’s first works premiered at the Yale Rep, and then began to be produced in regional theaters across the country. Before then, new plays were typically tested with a series of out-of-town tryouts at commercial houses. What replaced it, thanks to Richards and his collaborator’s innovation, was the practice of using nonprofit theaters with subscription audiences to develop and nurture the work.

“Lloyd said this had been in the works for years in his mind, for a regional theater network,” says Vance, who kept in touch with Richards until the director’s death. “He just needed that right playwright. August stepped up, and all the regional theaters were major beneficiaries, because when it went to Broadway they were all participating.”

“Fences,” which landed on Broadway in 1987 starring James Earl Jones and Mary Alice, changed industry perceptions of the types of drama that could make it on the street still known as “the Great White Way.”

It also helped colorize the lineup at regional theaters. “At the time these plays started to be produced -- and to this day -- the huge majority of subscription audiences at most of the larger theaters in America are white people, they’re not people of color,” says Epps. “So the change that occurred when these plays started being produced on such a frequent basis is that those white subscription audiences got used to the fact that they were going to see people who didn’t look exactly like them.”

And it wasn’t just that audiences were seeing new kinds of plays. “It was that system of collaboration between all of those theaters on August’s plays that really got the whole idea of co-productions started,” says Epps. “It was an extraordinarily brilliant system that they came up with.”

The revival of “Fences” is a labor of love and so much more. “Entering into the world of August Wilson is entering into something that’s larger than myself,” says Fishburne, who plays Troy and who made his 1992 Broadway debut in Wilson’s “Two Trains Running,” directed by Richards.

“August Wilson gave us the material, the map and a platform on which to tell our stories. So now we have to be about the business of keeping that going, and to do it with all of the pride and the pain and the joy and the anger and the beauty and the ugliness that’s in the material that he left us.”

For Bassett (Rose), as for so many, seeing “Fences” on Broadway was a formative experience. “I’ve seen lots of plays, but there are few that have profound resonance, and ‘Fences’ was one of those,” she says. “My head was blown, my heart was expanded, and I just believe all of us in that audience had a similar experience. It’s 20 years, and it’s still just seared into my heart and my memory.”

Vance, who is Bassett’s husband and a fellow Yale School of Drama alum, knows well the rich task facing this new group. “It is a very tall mountain that they have to climb,” he says. “It’s truly a collaborative effort to make an August Wilson play happen. It’s simple, but it’s elusive.”

*

A revolutionary drama

APRIL 30, 1985. New Haven, Conn. The Yale Repertory Theatre is a remodeled but still somewhat rickety brick church, on the Chapel Street edge of campus. On this temperate spring night, it is filled with its usual mix of drama students, subscribers and other New Havenites -- young, old and in-between; white, black and otherwise. In this city so divided by town-and-gown tensions -- a wealthy private university, surrounded by a black ghetto -- these men and women have put on their finery and congregated for a collective experience that will, at least for the few hours they are in its thrall, give the lie to such differences.

Richards, then artistic director of the Yale Rep, dean of the Yale School of Drama and head of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., had first invited Wilson to the annual summer conference in 1982. Now, only three years later, they had a houseful of theater-world heavyweights in attendance, since the 1984 premiere of Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” had served notice that the Wilson-Richards team was one to watch. Yet few in the house that night could have foreseen the impact that “Fences,” the play they were about to see, was to have on the American theater.

The story that would unfold was that of Maxson, a onetime ballplayer turned garbage collector, who fights fiercely for his family at the same time he psychologically batters them. Filled with the rage of life’s proper fullness denied, he not only forbids his son to accept an athletic scholarship but foists a wrenching betrayal upon his wife. With the burgeoning civil rights movement and a flush, yet conservative, postwar white America hovering unseen in the background, it is the story not only of family strife but of American male embitterment.

Roughly three hours later, when Act 2 had drawn to a close, there was a brief moment before the audience broke into applause -- that pause in the theater when people gather their breath, regain composure and try to take in what they’ve just experienced. And when the clapping did begin, there was a palpable sense that the story that had just been witnessed would go on to touch many more lives. The crowd lingered, reluctant to leave the Maxson family, go back down the Rep’s timeworn steps and out into the New Haven night.

“This is a play about fathers and sons,” says Epps, seated in his office at the Playhouse. “Many of Wilson’s plays deal with issues on a big canvas: racism, political unrest, even slavery. This play addresses the big issues, but from a personal perspective.”

For Vance, cast as Cory while a graduate acting student, that night in 1985 was the beginning of a life-changing experience. “The lessons in the play for who I am and who I was were monumental,” he says. “The idea that you can take the best of what’s in somebody and that’s what you make a life with -- what a wonderful lesson.”

It also launched his career. “The opportunity to watch James Earl and Mary Alice for three years was my second MFA,” Vance recalls, referring to the time spent in regional runs before “Fences’ ” arrival in New York. “I sat and watched a good 500 to 600 performances of Mary and James working things out. I was completely green when I started, and they taught me, waiting for me to catch up, and I’ll always be indebted.”

Bassett had graduated from the drama school in 1983 and returned to Yale Rep to appear in Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” in 1986 and on Broadway in 1988. She did not see “Fences” until it reached New York. But for her, Rose is also crucial. “It’s almost as if everyone has lived through that -- a betrayal, someone’s let you down,” she says. “And that’s neither black nor white, that’s human. And that’s what touched people. It is an experience of this black family, but it’s not only theirs.”

*

The cultural amalgam

WILSON often spoke quietly, and gently, so you’d have to lean forward to make out each carefully chosen word. That’s how it was one night a decade ago, when he sat in a back booth of a dimly lighted San Francisco eatery, talking to a reporter.

Originally a poet, Wilson first came to Richards’ attention with 1979’s “Jitney.” And although that script was not produced at the Rep then, it would be rewritten years later and incorporated into the historical cycle of plays that made Wilson famous. Wilson’s first major collaboration with Richards was “Ma Rainey,” followed by the even more successful “Fences.”

Wilson’s style mixed European American and African American traditions. “As a black artist, I chose to work in that genre of Western theater to articulate ideas about black culture,” he said. “You’ll see a proscenium ... a Western-style drama based on Aristotle.”

Though often criticized for long-windedness, Wilson stood firm, unafraid of abundant language or traditional dramaturgy, and let his characters talk. His style makes the plays, and “Fences” in particular, what Epps calls “approachable. Though the color of the people may be alien, the theatrical form is not that different than a great Williams play or a great Miller play.”

Like a musician with a 12-bar blues, Wilson took good, old-fashioned American kitchen-sink realism and riffed on it. And like the bluesman that he was, he let calculated variations on a theme and the meter of language matter as much as the words -- which can often seem deceptively simple, especially in “Fences.”

Before Wilson, young African American actors had to turn primarily to white authors to learn their craft. “In undergrad theater class, I could play in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ ‘The Children’s Hour,’ ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ and ‘Uncommon Women and Others,’ ” Bassett recalls during a break in rehearsals one recent day. “But it wasn’t a reality that I was going to get to play those roles professionally.

“August’s work came later, and it kept coming. So I felt really proud that that happened. And to be a part of that is exciting.”

For Epps, as an artistic director and as a director, the difference made by the Wilson canon is all too apparent. “There’s a joke, and it’s one of those tragicomic jokes, that every black person who works in the theater usually works in February, because every theater in America is doing an August Wilson play for Black History Month,” he says.

“That’s a sad statement, but the upside of that is that there was tremendous opportunity for those artists to work in theaters where otherwise they wouldn’t work. They would not be invited to exercise their craft, except for the fact that there is this abundance of material that was and should be produced over and over again.”

And “Fences” broke down more barriers than that, creating change on the other side of the proscenium as well. “The productions were largely for subscription white audiences, but they attracted huge numbers of single-ticket sales among the black audience,” explains Epps. “What is the number of people who entered those theaters who would not have entered those theaters otherwise, the number of black audience members who went to all of those theaters because their lives were being depicted onstage.”

According to Epps, there was a ripple effect. “Audiences were looking, on a regular basis, at people of color and getting to know them and share the same emotional experiences,” he says. “And that has made it not unusual for work by, for and about persons of color to be on the stages of major American theaters.”

The new method of using regional stages to develop productions that could go on to a commercial life also made it possible for smaller theaters to dream big. “Now co-productions happen all the time,” says Epps. “And that’s a direct result of the system that Lloyd, August and Ben came up with.”

These precedents laid the groundwork for work now being done at the Pasadena Playhouse, which is launching two major projects that may well continue. “Fences” and “Sister Act: The Musical,” which will follow directly after it, are already being eyed for Broadway and beyond.

Yet there is no denying that “Fences’ ” greatest legacy is the artistic one. “Wilson left us a huge body of work that allows us to take black life and present it on the level of art,” says Fishburne. “That’s a responsibility I am grateful to have as an actor. I don’t have to worry about convincing somebody I can do Lear, or ‘the Scottish play.’

“There are huge, monumental roles -- like Troy Maxson in ‘Fences’ -- that come out of the culture that I come out of, that speak to the universal truth in life.”

*

‘Fences’

Where: Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena

When: Opens Friday. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 5 and 9 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Oct. 1

Price: $38 to $60

Contact: (626) 356-PLAY