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Black American playwright August Wilson’s classic play FENCES is currently playing at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 Theatre. The director is Shari Sebbens, a Jibirr Jabirr person. Her interpretation of this complex play has brought the best out of the creative team. This is an outstanding production of a powerful and complex play.
This Sydney Theatre Company production follows on from its 2022 production of A RAISIN IN THE SUN by another Black American, Lorraine Hansbury. ‘Fences’ is set in Pittsburgh and ‘Raisi’n is set in Chicago, both in the 1950s. Zahra Newman, Bert Labonte and Damon Manns were in both plays. In FENCES, Bert Labonte plays the father Tory, Zahra Newman, the patient wife, Darius Williams the older son, Damon Manns, the younger son, and Doran Nkono the war-injured brother and Markus Hamilton, the loyal friend. The role of the young girl is shared by Molly Moriarty and Liannah Nanda Sibanda.
Being raised in the 1950s near Pittsburgh I feel somewhat proprietorial in writing this review. Did STC get it right? The accents were not quite as I recall but certainly believable. The set was definitely accurate. The clapboard frontage, the Esso barrel drums, the wood decorated screen door, the upstairs windows with the putty holding the glass panes in place. The costumes, the snap beans, the crockery – all accurate. Well done, Jeremy Allen, the designer. Well done also to composer and sound designer Brendon Boney.
Jazz opens the play, sets the mood and defines the 1950s. The music is Brendon’s own composition inspired mainly by Miles Davis and Roy Eldridge with a medley reminiscent of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles and John Lee Hooker. Brendan says ‘I worked and reworked the pieces quite extensively with the director Shari Sebbens to the point where they ended up quite different from the original inspirations.’
How different is the Aboriginal experience from the American Black experience? The differences may be greater than the similarities are between American and Australian indigenous peoples’ experiences. There are wonderful plays by American Indians yet they may be overlooked in favour of plays by American Blacks. Lynn Riggs, for example, was a well-known Cherokee playwright. ‘His Green Grow the Lilacs’ played Broadway and was the inspiration for ‘Oklahoma’. Would the American, Canadian, Tibetan, Uyghurs and other First Nations’ stories resonate more here, in Australia? Oh, so many stories to tell. One is not better than another. As August Wilson is quoted in the program as saying, “There is no idea that cannot be contained by black life”.
Oddly, while the set was glorious and authentic, the action did not move out of four square meters in front of the porch. There were two buildings with upstairs windows that were never used. There was the space beyond the Esso drums that no one walked on. Was it intended that the characters were trapped in those few square meters? Perhaps. They were certainly trapped by their disrupted pasts and their fear of a ruinous future. As Rose says to her husband Troy, who constantly fights both his inner fears and the discrimination, ‘Anything you can’t understand you call the Devil’. Despite Troy’s success in getting the right to drive the company truck, formerly only something whites could do, he is still haunted by his past and determined to control the future.
Which brings us to the title of the play, ‘Fences’. Troy attempts to finish building a paling fence that will keep other people out of his property, keep his family in, provide him with security, demonstrate he has accomplished something, and allow him to move on to the next chapter of his life.
There’s a tendency to over-analyse classic plays. Just go.
FENCES plays at Wharf 1, Pier 3-4, Sydney Theatre Company, Walsh Bay until May 6 2023.
View the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8GjYTEwY58
Featured image : Bert LaBone and Zahra Newman in Sydney Theatre Company’s FENCES, 2023. Pic Daniel Boud
