"Fences". Oxford Playhouse
Two years ago almost to the day, Oxford Playhouse staged Headlong Theatre’s production of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 family drama A Raisin in the Sun . In its day it was the first play by a Black woman to run on Broadway, and it was a theatrical breakthrough, confronting middle-class, white audiences with the everyday lives of African American families, and the daily discrimination with which they had to cope. Now Headlong is back with August Wilson’s Fences . Set in the same time-period as Raisin , it was written many years later, in 1985. Where Hansberry’s play was a manifesto calling for change and looking to the future, Wilson’s is a chronicle of a life that never reached its full potential. The two plays stand at opposite ends of the same decade, looking in. Both are astonishing pieces of drama. But Fences , in the hands of director Daniel Bailey, is also an elegy written in vernacular poetry. When he wrote Fences , August Wilson was trying to give white audiences a different way t...
