Theater: Fences

Cort Theatre

New York

(212) 239-6200

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You don’t need Denzel Washington to mount a successful version of August Wilson’s Fences, said Marilyn Stasio in Variety. But having an actor of Washington’s caliber at center stage “doesn’t hurt.” The fifth play in Wilson’s 10-play cycle about the African-American experience concerns Troy Maxson, a former Negro Leagues baseball star turned Pittsburgh sanitation worker. Washington gives an “especially moving” performance as Wilson’s tragic hero, while director Kenny Leon has assembled a first-rate supporting cast to help articulate some of Wilson’s most powerful, poetic ruminations on “the collective tragedy of the black working class.”

In the original, 1987 production, James Earl Jones delivered a “career-defining” take on Wilson’s most richly drawn character, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Stepping into Jones’ “outsize shadow” would be a formidable task for any actor, but Washington proves equal to it. Washington’s Troy is predictably less imposing than Jones’, but he’s also “more human and more intricately drawn.” From the moment that Washington launches into Troy’s salty, first-act monologue about the time that he went “mano a mano with the grim reaper,” during a three-day bout with pneumonia, “you quickly sense that everything is going to be all right.”

Washington may be the box office draw, but the performance that will “stick with you” is that of Viola Davis as Troy’s wife, Rose, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. This seasoned performer has made her mark onstage, in Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, and in the film version of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. Here she delivers a lesson in just “how brutally true to life great acting can be.” As a loyal wife turned bitter by news of Troy’s infidelity, she attacks Wilson’s dialogue with obvious relish, “uttering sentences so pointed they make you want to laugh out loud with delight.” Bravo to Davis, Washington, and Leon for reminding us why Fences “is one of the half-dozen finest American plays of the postwar era.”