I don’t write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that’s not why I write. I work as an artist.
- August Wilson, The Art Of Theatre, Paris Review, 1999
I read Fences in Urbana-Champaign Il, in late August, in that blazingly hot summer of '99. It was part of the readings for a MFA theatre history class at The Mason Gross School For The Arts at Rutgers University, a class that I somehow managed to talk my way into. I was bolting from a research position at Rutgers, and I had bolted from NJ in that hot dry fiery late August summer. I didn't know exactly where I was going at that moment, but I knew exactly what I wanted to do . . .
Fences was, and remains, one of the most moving plays I have ever read, and it is a landmark in 20th Century theatre.
Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. The city devoured them. They swelled its belly until it bust into a thousand furnaces and sewing machines, a thousand butcher shops and bakers' ovens, a thousand churches and hospitals and funeral parlors and moneylenders. The city grew. It nourished itself and offered each man a partnership limited only by his talent, his guile, and his willingness and capacity for hard work. For the immigrants of Europe, a dream dared and won true.
The descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome or participation. They came from places called the Carolinas and the Virginias, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, The came strong, eager, searching. The city rejected them and they fled and settled along the riverbanks and under bridges in shallow, ramshackle houses made of sticks and tarpaper. The collected rags and wood. They sold the the use of their muscles and their bodies. The cleaned houses and washed clothes, they shined shoes, and in quiet desperation and vengeful pride, they stole, and lived in pursuit of their own dream. That they could breathe free, finally, and stand to meet life with the force of dignity and whatever eloquence the heart could call upon.
By 1957, the hard-won victories of the European immigrants had solidified the industrial might of America.War had been confronted and won with new energies that used loyalty and patriotism as its fuel. Life was rich, full, and flourishing. The Milwaukee Braves won the World Series, and the hot winds of change that would make the sixties a turbulent, racing, dangerous, and provocative decade had not yet begun to blow full . . .
- August Wilson, preface to Fences, 1985.
