FENCES

“A man is supposed to take care of his family. You live in my house, fill your belly with my food, put your behind on my bed, because you’re my son. It’s my duty to take care of you; I owe a responsibility to you.” – Troy Maxson, Fences

*The following blog post is written as though we're all familiar with the source material, and contains gentle spoilers. That's all the warning you get.*

During a scene in the final act of the movie FENCES, based on the decorated August Wilson play of the same name, the presence of lead character Troy Maxson is described by his younger son as being outsized, subsuming his own life and sense of self. This particular testimony is unique in that it comes from the only person in the story who has lived their entire life with the main character looming over them. The elder Maxson is angrily eulogized as a fearsome being whose shadow crept over and into everything in their home, including their souls. By this point in the narrative, the audience knows this to be true, but our vantage point also allows us a more nuanced perspective. At times, Troy is shown to be every bit as menacing as his son Cory sees him; at others he makes us laugh as he weathers each new indignity with a tall tale, a shrug, and a bottle of gin. By the end though, we can’t help but pity him for the self-destructive complexities he seems incapable of reconciling.

Not unlike Troy, Wilson similarly casts a very long shadow over his hometown. Thanks to his Pulitzer and Tony winning stageplays, many of the nooks and crannies of historical life here in Pittsburgh have been preserved in the arts for the ages. The esteem of being a musician who played onstage at The Crawford Grill and the significance of having once belonged to a Negro league baseball team that took to fields in Homestead are no mere footnotes in Wilson’s works; here, they are mythic undertakings, the stuff that defines the character of fictional constructs and the real-life individuals they are based on. The author took his responsibility to this duty seriously, at times so much you might wonder if he liked his own characters, so achingly earnest are the labors he visits upon them.