Fences

Deb 4 Me 4

This is a little out of the ordinary but we went to see a play instead of a movie so here goes a theater review.

Fences is a 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning play written by August Wilson. He has written a bunch of stuff and got a whole bunch of awards, all of which have escaped my attention over the years. We saw the production on the Segerstrom Stage of the South Coast Repertory. These theaters are cool. You’re in kiddie chairs stacked up against the stage where the actors can actually spit on you in the good seats. This was a one-set play in two one hour acts with a fifteen-minute intermission. The set was a really nice Norman Rockwell slum, apparently set in Pittsburg, but could have been any most anywhere.

The first act was not much to write about. The main guy was played by Charlie Robinson who played Mac on the TV show Night Court. He is very good. But basically all the players were like caricatures. They were all exaggerated folks who had stereotype written all over them. All the people in the play are black and they all played up that step-and-fetch-it kind of black. It seemed a bit derogatory.

Race relations have been pissing me off more and more lately. When was it, 1865 that the black slaves were freed? Then it took another hundred years before blacks could legally use the same restaurants, hotels, public transportation, even bathrooms as the white folks. After a hundred years of being freed they still couldn’t go to the schools of their choice or even vote. So white America has been pretty successful at not bringing the black community up to white community standards. And there doesn’t seem to be any push to do so. And the black population doesn’t seem to be in any hurry either. Maybe they’re just too beat up after so many generations of being spit on. But I don’t like it. I don’t like that most blacks live in horrible ghettos with little hope of getting out and no one is making room for them if they wanted to. Sure there are more exceptions today than there have ever been, but they are still exceptions.

So this play is written about a poor black neighborhood with poor black attitudes and limitations all interpreted by a white writer. I’m sure he’s sympathetic to their plight, but it all just seemed wrong to me. After a hundred and fifty years of keeping freed blacks “in their place”, this play did nothing to help them change. It obviously wasn’t the author’s goal, but it seemed like another Pulitzer opportunity missed.

Intermission was good. Then we went back in for the second act and it featured the wife, Rose, played by Juanita Jennings. She was the first real engaging part of the play. Everything she said made sense and fit in the story. The play continued for a while, feeding off her energy and then got lost again.

What I mean by lost is that there were a lot of story points that just seemed inconsequential. They spent a lot of time developing points that was never fully addressed or resolved. The play was filled with metaphors that were either contradictory or forgotten by the end of the play. It seemed like Wilson’s story was just edited very heavily for time and there was a lot of key points left on the editing floor. Too bad.

I like plays and just putting one on gets it some points. Deb liked it a lot more than I did although it’s not really reflected in the point spread.

If you don’t go, stay home and watch the Great Santini. It is pretty much the same story. The vehicles used are different, Santini was a white warrior bitter at having no war; Fences was a black man bitter about missing his lot in life. Santini is just a lot more engaging for me.