Fences

Fences (1985) is a play by the African-American dramatist August Wilson, the sixth in his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle chronicling the Black American experience decade by decade across the twentieth century. Set in the 1950s in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it centres on Troy Maxson, a fifty-three-year-old garbage collector and former Negro League baseball star who was denied a career in Major League Baseball because of racial segregation.

The central conflict

Troy dominates his family with a mixture of love, resentment and authoritarianism. He clashes with his son Cory, a talented high-school football player, over whether Cory should pursue a college football scholarship. Troy, scarred by his own crushed athletic dreams, refuses to let Cory follow a path he believes will lead to the same racial rejection. Meanwhile, Troy's relationship with his wife Rose fractures when he reveals an affair and a coming child. The play builds toward a reckoning between father and son, husband and wife, and a man and the racial system that shaped him.

Key concerns

The play explores race and the legacy of segregation, the father-son relationship, responsibility and betrayal, dreams deferred and denied, the meaning of manhood, and the metaphor of fences, the barriers people build to keep others out or to hold them in. Wilson presents Troy as both hero and villain, a man whose strength and flaws are inseparable from the racial injustice that formed him.