INSIDE a vacant former furniture store, former Negro League baseball player Troy Maxson wrestles with his betrayal of his wife, Rose -- and silently but equally powerfully, with the emotional fallout from generations of racism and inequity.
In this simple but magical room, on a platform filled with the detritus of a hardscrabble existence and dreams deferred, some of the finest African American artists of their generation are melding passion and craft, breathing life into a vibrant piece of living history.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday August 27, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 35 words Type of Material: Correction
"Fences": An article in today's Calendar section about a production of the play "Fences" by August Wilson states that the play, at the Pasadena Playhouse, opens Friday. In fact, the play opened there last Friday.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday September 01, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction
'Fences': A briefing item and a correction in the Sunday A section incorrectly stated that the play "Fences" at the Pasadena Playhouse opened Aug. 25. The play started preview performances Aug. 25 and will officially open today.
They are rehearsing August Wilson's Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning "Fences," a play that changed the American theater. Starring Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett, and directed by Sheldon Epps, the production opens Friday at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Set in 1957 Pittsburgh, "Fences" transformed the theatrical landscape not only artistically but also in the way plays are produced and presented. Of the 10-play decade-by-decade Wilson canon, it remains his "landmark" play, the one that has been and still is most produced, most awarded and, in short, the one that made the greatest and most lasting imprint on the American theater.
" 'Fences' is his most 'commercial' because it's his simplest, his easiest to follow," says Courtney B. Vance, who played Rose and Troy's son, Cory, in the original cast at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985 and on Broadway in 1987. "It's an American drama."
"I think it is one of the best-written of Wilson's plays," adds Epps, who is also the artistic director of the Playhouse. "It is one of the most focused and one of the most clearly emotionally driven of the canon. It is clearly and cleanly about what is going on in the relationships of that family."
What makes this Pasadena revival particularly poignant is not only the starry cast, but the timing. The three men responsible for the "Fences" revolution -- Wilson, director Lloyd Richards and producer Benjamin Mordecai -- have all died recently, marking the end of an era. Richards died of heart failure last month on his 87th birthday. He was preceded by his 60-year-old protege Wilson, who died of cancer in October, and Mordecai in May 2005, also of cancer at age 60.
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Rise of the regional network
THE quiet revolution began in the early 1980s, when Wilson's first works premiered at the Yale Rep, and then began to be produced in regional theaters across the country. Before then, new plays were typically tested with a series of out-of-town tryouts at commercial houses. What replaced it, thanks to Richards and his collaborator's innovation, was the practice of using nonprofit theaters with subscription audiences to develop and nurture the work.
