In these moments, Washington’s signature laugh - the one that launches straight from his belly and winds up a joyous coughing fit - becomes almost weaponized. Troy’s good-natured cynicism on topics like his failed baseball career (pre-Jackie Robinson) can turn on a dime to thinly veiled anger. Walking home, then hanging around in his backyard, Troy and Bono share a bottle of booze back and forth right up until it’s done. Washington plays Troy, a fiftysomething Fifties garbage collector who’s jovial and entertaining as he holds court on the job and after work with his best friend, Bono (Stephen Henderson).
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But it also stands as an aching, lyrical, performance-driven masterpiece in its own right, a film so intense and engrossing that movie houses really should screen it with an intermission.
This screen adaptation, a wide release starring and directed by Denzel Washington, one of this country’s last true movie stars, is vital because it has the potential to reach marginalized communities. But for as much as we theater nerds know and love the play, the fact remains that most African Americans have not felt invited to see it. When Fences premiered in 1983, the language was a welcome breath of smoggy, industrial air in the pristine, over-enunciated theater, and ever since it’s remained one of the most frequently produced scripts in America.įences puts black lives in the center of their own stories. Wilson, who didn’t study theater in school, tuned his ear by listening to the cadence and diction of the people in his working-class neighborhood of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where most of his plays are set. If you’ve stepped anywhere near the theater - and I mean the playhouse here - you’ve read, seen, or heard about it. I shouldn’t have to explain why Fences, the August Wilson play now adapted for the screen, is important.
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