By Barbara Smith, Contributing Writer
The Old Globe Theatre’s current production of Fences arrives as a living, breathing reckoning. Directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg and running through May 4, August Wilson’s enduring masterpiece, though written over four decades ago, still resonates in its examination of family, honor, duty, and betrayal, pressing its emotional truths squarely into the present.
Set in 1950s Pittsburgh, Fences examines race in America alongside the generational weight of poverty, trauma, and deferred dreams. At its center is Troy Maxson, a former Negro Leagues baseball player now working as a sanitation laborer. The play captures the specific constraints faced by Black men of Troy’s era while also speaking broadly to the fragile architecture of family life—how love, pride, and disappointment can coexist in uneasy balance.
Dorian Missick brings commanding depth to Troy. His opening monologue, complaining that only white men are allowed to drive garbage trucks, establishes a man shaped by injustice, fluent in grievance, and prone to mythmaking. As best friend Bono later jokes, Troy has “more stories than the devil got sinners.” Yet beneath the bravado lies a man formed by violence and deprivation, raised by a father “who ain’t cared nothing about kids” and left without the emotional tools to break that cycle. Missick’s performance captures both the magnetism and the damage, making Troy at once formidable and painfully human.
The play’s emotional spine is the fraught relationship between Troy and his son Cory, played with clarity and conviction by Omari K. Chancellor. Cory represents a new generation—hopeful, ambitious, and willing to believe in possibilities Troy has long dismissed. Their drama intensifies with Cory’s wounded question, “Why don’t you like me?” Troy’s blunt reply that it’s his duty to provide, not to like him, lands like a harsh verdict.
With an almost all-male cast, De’Adre Aziza brings grace and grit to her character Rose, Troy’s wife of 18 years. Rose is the play’s moral compass, and Aziza gives her warmth in the opening scenes, playfully skirting Troy’s bawdy advances. In a key Act II scene, when she reveals her own silenced dreams in a devastating monologue, describing planting her seed in “hard soil” that would never bloom, it is in many ways the production’s emotional high-water mark, with Rose wresting power back from a man who never noticed she’d surrendered it.
Rondrell McCormick’s Bono serves as both companion and conscience, matching Troy’s storytelling rhythms, shucking and jiving in the yard with his buddy, while quietly challenging his missteps. As the play’s truth-teller, Bono grounds the narrative, offering insight without judgment. Donathan Walters brings an angelic sweetness to Gabriel, Troy’s brother, whose war injury leaves him straddling innocence and prophecy. With trumpet in hand, Gabriel’s belief that he will open the gates of Heaven adds a spiritual dimension that hovers over the play.
Music pulses throughout the production. Blues connects the scenes, while Rose’s gospel hums beneath the household’s ordinary rhythms. Lyons (Mister Fitzgerald), Troy’s eldest son, embodies another artistic thread, insisting he needs music “to get out of bed in the morning.” These elements deepen the play’s emotional texture, connecting personal struggle to a broader cultural expression.
The design work is equally effective. The Maxson home—modest, tidy, and carefully maintained—anchors the story in a recognizable reality. Nearly all the action unfolds in the yard, where the slowly constructed fence becomes a central symbol. As Bono observes, some people build fences to keep others out, while others build them to keep people in. Here, the fence reflects Rose’s desire for unity and Troy’s instinct toward isolation. Lighting by Sherrice Mojgani, informed by a visit to Pittsburgh’s Hill District, further enhances the production’s authenticity. The final scene shifts the tone toward grace in the character of young Raynell, played endearingly by Justus Alexander, giving rise to the hopeful notion that a child shall lead the way.
Wilson’s language, richly rendered under Sonnenberg’s direction, creates a world so vivid we see ourselves in it. This production reminds us why Fences endures: it tells the truth about how we fail each other—and how, sometimes, we find our way back.
