A flawed man builds a fence around his family the best way he knows: withholding acknowledgments of love from his sons to toughen their hides, while taking advantage of his wife’s willingness to deny her own doubts that he is the finest husband in the world.
The late playwright August Wilson’s Pulitzer prize-winning Fences was written in 1984 and set in 1957, the second in his cycle of 10 plays covering each decade of the 20th century. The play’s poetic vernacular is specific to working-class African American lives, a theatrical ode to the people Wilson knew growing up in urban Pittsburgh.
