Rescuing the Tragic Bully in August Wilson's Fences

MYLES WEBER Rescuing the Tragic Bully in August Wilson’s Fences t the end of Fences (1985), the third entry in what would become August A-Wilsons ten-play cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the twentieth century, Gabriel Maxson attempts to instruct Saint Peter to open the gates of heaven and receive the soul of his recently deceased older brother Troy, the play’s self-absorbed bully of a protagonist. The surviving Maxson sibling, a brain-damaged military veteran bearing a metal plate in his head, believes “with every fiber of his being” that he is actually his Christian namesake, the archangel Gabriel; but without a mouthpiece for his trumpet, Gabe fails in three attempts to produce sound through the instrument. Having waited some twenty-odd years for this moment, though, the character refuses to accept defeat. “He begins to dance,” writes Wilson. “A slow, strange dance, eerie and life-giving. A dance of atavistic signature and ritual.” Once Gabriel finishes, claim the stage directions, the gates of heaven open “as wide as God’s closet” to receive Troy’s spirit. “Hence, the menacing Troy has been forgiven,” observed Ladrica Menson-Furr, “and will find a home in the spiritual realm.” By having a character summon a divine force to rescue the deceased protago nist—whether that force is truly Christian in nature or pagan and African as nu merous Wilson scholars have contended—the playwright seems to break with Aristotelian tradition, which would normally oblige the protagonist to endure, unhappily ever after, the consequences of his own hubristic error. Yet in 1998, after seven of Wilson’s ten major works had been staged, Joan Herrington wrote, “Of all Wilson’s plays, Fences most closely follows orthodox western views of tragic form.” In 1996 Wilson himself told Carol Rosen that Fences was the most “conventional” of the plays he had drafted to that point—plays that included, in addition to Fences, the apprentice work Jitney (1982), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986), The Piano Lesson (1987), Two Trains Running (1990), and Seven Guitars (1995). With the exception of Fences, explained the playwright, these 648 MYLES WEBER works were ensemble pieces with “their own rules” or what he called “my own way of executing Aristotle’s Poetics. My interpretation of all that.” But clearly Fences does not solicitously observe Aristotle’s structural rules either: at play’s end, Troy Maxson is offered the same spiritual deliverance provided to the title character at the end of Oedipus at Colonus, a drama notable precisely for the sort of deus ex machina ending Aristotle counseled against. If by the mid-1980s Wilson was creating characters who undergo self-inflicted crises in accordance with the classical Greek tradition, an African American coun terforce, the blues, had much earlier seized hold of Wilson’s artistic imagination, conveying a sustaining power amid its mournful observations of black American life. This placed Wilson in a bind, for while Aristotle’s Poetics instructed that Troy Maxson must thwart his own good fortune, the songs of Bessie Smith and other blues artists implied that a black protagonist possessed the ability to endure. Wilson attempted in Fences to reconcile these two competing impulses by emulating the dramatic source Aristotle would probably have found least objectionable as a model for structural variation: the Sophoclean oeuvre itself, specifically one of the Theban plays. But, truth be told, these clashing imperatives produced a puzzling work in Fences, a play whose egotistical protagonist is rescued from a self-imposed state of dishonor for no clear reason other than his racial identity and the political implications of being black. Sophocles certainly provided Wilson with a viable model for a protagonist’s spiri tual deliverance. Robert Bagg, in the prefatory materials to his translation of the Theban plays, sets the scene for blind Oedipus’s liberation from his worldly suffer ing at the end of Oedipus at Colonus: “In the sacred grove of the Eumenides”—the former Furies, identified in the play as the Kindly Ones—“Oedipus will find the mercy, and in a sense the rebirth, Apollo promised him at Delphi—almost as an afterthought—when as a troubled young man he received the worst news any Greek ever heard from a god: he was doomed to kill his father and his mother would bear his children.” Within that grove, explains Bagg, elderly Oedipus is transformed “from a reviled exile into a revered hero,” and he achieves “an inner peacefulness during his final hour that precedes his entry into Hades and his promised emer gence into the afterlife.” After Oedipus’s departure the play’s Messenger reports to all assembled that, as the end of Oedipus’s life approached, the gods sent an escort for the deposed king, with “the lightless depths of Earth bursting open in kindness to receive him.” 649 :------ THE SOUTHERN REVIEW ................= Likewise in Fences, following eight years of estrangement from his son Cory and eight years spent as “a womanless man”—declared so by Rose, the wife in whose care he dumps his baby daughter from another woman—Troy Maxson is redeemed, though posthumously. When, while on bereavement leave from the service, Cory reappears on stage in his marine corporal’s uniform, he is determined to ceremo niously skip his father’s funeral. “I’ve got to say no to him,” he tells his mother. “One time in my life I’ve got to say no.” But Rose wins this rhetorical battle— “Disrespecting your daddy ain’t gonna make you a man,” she tells him—so by the time Uncle Gabe shows up, trumpet in hand, even Cory is prepared to pay his respects as the patriarch’s spirit ascends to the heavens. For this reason Fences, like Oedipus at Colonus, seems to conclude with the benign ending of a comedy, notwithstanding its reputation as Wilson’s most Aristotelian tragedy. “Do you think of your plays as tragedies in the classic sense?” Wilson was asked in 1990. “I would certainly hope so—I aspire to write tragedies,” he replied. “Tragedy is the greatest form of dramatic literature. Why settle for anything less than that?” Further toeing the Aristotelian line, the playwright clarified: “My sense of what a tragedy is includes the fall of the flawed character; that is certainly a part of what is in my head when I write.” Six years later, when commended for his decision to have the character Floyd Barton murdered by a close friend in Seven Guitars, Wilson returned to this point. “It’s tragic. It wouldn’t be tragic if the police killed him,” the playwright explained. “Floyd has to assume the responsibility for his own death, his own murder.” Actually, had the police killed a well-armed Floyd Barton fleeing the scene of a robbery, the spoils of which make him the mistaken target of his homicidal friend Hedley, Floyd’s poor judgment could still be said to have triggered his own demise. But having a protagonist get shot down by white police officers in 1948 Pittsburgh would have raised questions about the notion of culpability for a black thief in a racist culture and distracted attention from the playwright’s primary aim: to de vise a plot in which the hero serves as his own worst enemy. “Wilson,” concluded Sandra G. Shannon, “peoples his plays with black men and women who grapple with themselves within the racist scheme of things.” Such grappling was the outcome of one of the most remarkable mentoring relationships in the history of American theater. “Without a question he’s been sin gularly important to both my work and my career,” Wilson freely admitted in 1991 about Lloyd Richards, the longtime dean of the Yale School of Drama and head of 650 ----------' ---- MYLES WEBER ------ the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut (where many of Wilson’s plays received early public readings), and ultimately the director of six Wilson plays, nearly all of which debuted at the Yale Repertory Theatre prior to their runs on Broadway. “I count myself fortunate to have had Lloyd Richards as my guide, my mentor, and my provocateur,” Wilson acknowledged. “From the O’Neill to Yale to Broadway, each step, in each guise, his hand has been firmly on the tiller as we charted the waters from draft to draft.” According to Charles Dutton, the actor who originated the roles of Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Herald Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson, Lloyd Richards was responsible for most of the struc tural changes to the scripts Wilson produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, including Fences. “August doesn’t limit himself,” Dutton observed about the playwright’s ini tial drafting process. “He just lets the plays run for as long as they like to.” But when the resulting scenes needed to be pared down, reordered, or cut, Wilson accepted input from Richards. “If it’s one thing that Lloyd is an expert in, it is the way a play should move,” Dutton told Herrington. “And August listens, intently, to Lloyd’s suggestions.” On the latter point, Richards concurred with the actor, explaining about Wilson: “The very simple fact is that he is a poet, and a poet does not write a dramatic story line.” The task Richards faced, then, was to instruct Wilson on how to draw upon the “very marvelous characters” and “wonderful events” in his drafts and “put a spine in the play.” Naturally the playwright was no innocent bystander to the revision process, but even Wilson himself gave extensive credit to Richards for “shaping” the final form of the manuscripts on which they collaborated.

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