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Perhaps the most popularly successful of August Wilson’s plays, Fences is currently enjoying a notable vogue in its first Broadway revival since the original production in 1987 that starred James Earl Jones, but less for the celebrity in the audience than for the star power on stage: Hollywood visitors Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in the lead roles. Originating from director Kenny Leon’s nascent production at Boston’s distinguished Huntington Theatre in 2009, it was recast, ostensibly for star power, for there were no “names” attached to that Boston production.
Despite less-than-consistent critical encomiums in its Broadway reincarnation, the production has been selling out—a rare feat for a serious, straight play on Broadway, especially one that focuses on the African American experience. If you have the fortitude to wait for day-of-show cancellations, you will be charged the price for premium seats: more than $400 per ticket. Clearly, there is a synergy at work. Combine a great play with star power and the potential to attract traditional and non-traditional (read: not white) audiences and the payoff is enormous. In fact, the grand popular success of the revival is making even Hollywood pay attention, once again, to Broadway. There is considerable talk that the play, long rumored for cinematic treatment, may now find its way to the local multiplex.
And that would be unfortunate.
The only Wilson play to be filmed so far was made for TV: a respectful production of The Piano Lesson featuring much of the original Broadway cast, directed by its Broadway director Lloyd Richards, and presented on “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” clearly not destined to be a great ratings winner but another succes d’estime for the Hallmark hallmark. In addition, when newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama took his wife on a long-promised first post-election date, they chose to attend the Lincoln Center Theatre’s revival of Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, thereby raising that play’s--and the playwright’s—profile even further. Now, Fences is poised to become, in a new medium, the highest-profile project among Wilson’s ten “century cycle” plays, with the long queues and bustling box office suggesting a bright green future.
But off-stage as well as on, this Fences is a cautionary tale. There is a price to be paid for such popular success as Hollywood entices with, and its lesson is especially appropriate to the life and work of August Wilson. As a child in Pittsburgh (where nine of his ten cycle plays are set), the impoverished Wilson watched his struggling mother win--and then lose--a new washing machine in a contest sponsored by a local radio station. The delivery men, upon seeing that the winner was a single black woman with children of mixed ethnicity, took the washer back and instead brought her a certificate for a used one from the Salvation Army—which she promptly refused. “Something ain’t always better than nothing,” Wilson recalls his mother teaching him about the experience. Sadly, the same may be said for this recent incarnation of Fences. While any serious production of a serious play that meets with such success should be welcome—especially for the black audiences that usually avoid the Great White Way—“something” should not be enough to satisfy, and there’s the rub.
Viola Davis and Denzel Washington in the Broadway revival of the August Wilson play Fences.
I had the great good fortune to secure tickets to the play. Having been astonished by the power of the same production of Joe Turner at the Belasco Theatre that lured the First Couple, I was eager to renew my acquaintance with Wilson’s work just a few blocks to the north at the Cort Theatre, courtesy of a group of theatre professionals whose successes are notable. However, I should have been forewarned by some cautionary word of mouth. Apparently, these “new” Broadway audiences were acting out as if they were attending Amateur Night at the Apollo or some churchified morality play designed more to elicit shouts and laughs than to evoke pity and fear, the Aristotelian earmarks of great tragedy. It seems as if, in its most recent incarnation, Fences was being welcomed to what Henry Louis Gates (and others) call “the Chitlin circuit”: a trope of plays, particularly by and for black audiences, that illustrate contemporary black American life in moralistic, pulpit-style platitudes that target the lowest common denominator in popular acceptance: euthanizing the audience with what they know and telling the audience what they want to hear, rather than challenging them to consider the complex and contradictory human dilemma.
Denzel Washington, left, and Viola Davis are in a scene from the Broadway revival of August Wilson's Fences, at the Cort Theatre in New York.
This talk of neo-“call and response” was, of course, merely rumor; confirmed word had not yet reached the street of Denzel Washington stepping out of character to quiet the growing “audience participation,” though notice of his actions would soon be getting about the Rialto. Still, recalling the critical words of critic Robert Brustein that Wilson was writing “victim literature,” I reserved judgement. After all, affecting drama should stir an audience. In the words of Wilson himself, “Art changes individuals; individuals change society.” Shouldn’t people be moved? Shouldn’t they, as I was at the stunning climax to Joe Turner, be lifted out of their seats—out of their lives, out of their comfort zones—by an artistic rendering of life so charged that to sit still is simply an impossibility?
Alas, it was not the audience that was failing the production, despite what I saw as vocal--but not overly exaggerated--audience response. Rather, it was the production that failed its audience in one particular way.
Alas.
In his 1991 essay “Where to Begin?” August Wilson delineated his ethics of writing. “To write,” he said, “is to fix language, to get it down and fix it to a spot and have it have meaning and be fat with substance.”
Perhaps fearing the play’s sheer cascade of words, language, and ideas, along with a nearly three-hour running time, a dearth of physical action, and a hint of the metaphysical—it mostly comprises people sitting around talking—the production’s powers-that-be seem to have settled on a strategy that that would serve the desires and needs of the audience rather than those of the play. No wonder audiences were responding so audibly; the production gave them license to do so. In the words of Todd Boyd, writing for the website The Root, “There’s a reason why there’s never been an adaptation of August Wilson at the multiplex. When it comes to the lives of black folks, Hollywood—and the movie-going audience—doesn’t do complicated, nuanced or subtle.” Clearly, the same could be said for the theatre-going audience, and just as clearly, this production of Fences seemed to have taken that assessment to heart.
Sitting and watching Washington and company machine-gun their way through the poetry of Wilson’s sharply observed dialect, I was put in mind of another “black” play: Dreamgirls. When profit-hungry producer Curtis Taylor, Jr. fires loose cannon James “Thunder” Early for, essentially, being too black for white audiences, he chastises the grinning singer who claims an inability to sing Johnny Mathis-type easy-listening songs: “That’s because, Jimmy, you don’t trust the music/And that’s because, Jimmy, you don’t trust the words.” That refrain ricocheted around my brain, along with the rapid-fire dialogue in Fences that practically left skid marks on my ears as it raced along. What a stark contrast it was to hear Wilson’s lines being flung at the audience and to consider the process by which the words came to be written.
In a 1996 article, Wilson describes how he began the process of writing a play by first washing his hands as a cleansing ritual, because he considered writing a “mystical and spiritual experience.” Then he strolled around his neighborhood—particularly the Hill district in Pittsburgh, his favorite dramatic locale. He ordered coffee at a diner, sat with a notebook in hand and waited for voices around him to land in his ear: “Sometimes, nobody wants to talk to me. That’s cool. I’ll wait a while and if it’s no good, I’ll move on to the next coffee shop. Like fishing.” The unhurried, even languid, pace of his creative process and its respect for the sound of the human voice and the language that transmits it is not what is being delivered at the Cort Theatre, however. The words--and the richly developed theme-and-variation conversations comprising them--that have earned Wilson Pulitzer Prizes and Tony Awards and Drama Desk awards, along with myriad others, are being flattened in a mad rush to the final curtain and to keep the proceedings from becoming too intense for an audience that the production seems to feel “doesn’t do complicated.”
Perhaps the most egregious example of this incomprehensible disrespect for the language and dialect that fired Wilson and distinguishes his literate drama comes when Washington’s Troy Maxson, the bitter ex-baseball player, describes to his friend and wife how he fought down the Devil. The speech—as much a soliloquy as anything in the play, for it is designed to be a pep talk for himself in his coming trials at work and home—is played as a comic battle between a street poseur—a 1950s gangsta with swagger--and a braggart Devil. This is the same conflict that Maxon will again have to engage at the climax of the play, but because of the play’s desire to entertain the crowds, and its haste to come in under two and a half hours, the moment is lost. It’s just part of Maxon’s bragging, rather than the heart of his conflicts with the world and himself. It gets laughs when it should induce chills. And it is only one such example.
Roger Robinson and Marsha Stephanie Blake in Bartlett Sher's revival of the August Wilson play Joe Turner's Come and Gone, at the Belasco Theater (2009).One of the challenges is that Wilson’s plays are not trying to answer all the difficult questions. Rather, they often erupt with new questions that may or may not be answered. Witness the startlingly brief denouement of Joe Turner: the climax occurs, and then rather than relying on falling action to return the audience to some position of equilibrium, the play ends, refusing to clarify what just happened: it is enough that the event happened. Wilson does not spoon-feed. In his absence, the producers of Fences seem to have taken on the task for themselves; the fewer questions raised, the fewer need to be answered.
If it is true, according to Boyd’s claims in The Root, that Wilson’s work is wrought too finely to be widely appreciated or understood by black American audiences and the money moguls of Hollywood, “where all the creative life is often sucked from potentially brilliant works,” then it is not hard to see that this production in its casting, performance and direction (though Leon, also a Hollywood director, is perhaps more active in the theatre and has long been associated with Wilson, directing the original Broadway productions of Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf, among others) resonates with West Coast sensibilities and sees the aesthetics of the play as through a funhouse glass, less darkly. Perhaps it is not surprising that Leon, already a bankable director because of his recent stage and television version of the classic A Raisin in the Sun, in which he allowed or encouraged significant cuts and changes to the classic Lorraine Hansberry script. And while that project was instigated by Sean “Diddy” Combs by means of establishing his rep as a serious (!) actor, it was Leon’s concept that eventually made a splash on stage and television. Phylicia Rashad’s outstanding performance notwithstanding, it was not Hansberry’s play any more than this Fences represents Wilson honestly.
There is a further irony at insidious play with this streamlined Fences. Wilson specified that major productions of his work were to be directed by black directors only, feeling that only someone who lived the experience could interpret his plays with the greatest validity. When Lincoln Center Theatre announced Bartlett Sher—a white director of considerable reputation—as director of Joe Turner, the claxons rang out, announcing a willing disregard for Wilson’s politics and aesthetics. That production received across-the-board raves, and upon its opening, the race issue quickly became silenced. Kenny Leon, an African American director, inspired no such pre-opening dyspepsia among the cognoscenti, yet his production flies far afield from the Wilson style, temperament, and respect of the language of Wilson’s Hill district.
Art is art. Opinions about art are relative. New theatrical productions of older plays need not be slavish in their adherence to the original, and I have often found myself delighted by unexpected discoveries in older plays: Brian Dennehy’s shattering descent into Willy Loman’s overwrought psyche rivaling if not surpassing that of the original Lee J. Cobb; Vanessa Redgrave’s unearthly Mary Tyrone; and the Donmar/Roundabout’s reconstruction of Cabaret, to name a few. However, these are all examples of art and artists who found more of what was already there, expanding rather than contracting the texts and contexts.
We know there is good art and bad art, and while critics, pundits and the proletariat all eventually decide what is embraced as valid and valuable, I wonder if, in trying to achieve popular success, we may not be sacrificing too much of what led to success. I often teach a course in American drama that traces a 20th century history of great plays and playwrights in terms of how they approach and interrogate success. Willy Loman, James Tyrone, Walter Lee Younger and others—many others—seem to teach a consistent lesson in the challenges engaged when one places personal gain above social or cultural ethics. The lesson is clear: sell out your people (family, neighbors, community) and you invoke your own doom.
I am not claiming that the artists involved in this production of Fences evince no respect for the art of August Wilson. Indeed, the major and minor names attached to the project would have every reason (though not all of them have equal ability) to do justice to Wilson’s achievement. However, I felt as I watched the play careen across the stage that if Wilson’s work is indeed among the very finest of its kind in the American dramatic tradition, then perhaps it is for the best that Fences—at least this version of Fences—remain a creature of the stage. The presence of Kenny Leon and a host of celebrity endorsements indicate that there is a good chance Hollywood will finally come calling in a big way. It will get award nominations because it seriously addresses issues of race in the United States, a sure-fire means by which to win the Gold Derby. It might even win Washington another Oscar and reenergize Davis’ options to rights of first refusal. However, if the cinematic Fences replicates its Broadway strategy of speed, sermons and smiles, the result may tilt the tills to full, but its soul will starve. After all, something ain’t always better than nothing.
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