Set in the 1950s, August Wilson’s play Fences portrays a nation in transition. Jackie Robinson had crossed the color line in baseball, and integration began to take place in schools and workplaces. Set in Pittsburgh, Fences — running through Feb. 4 at the Sixth Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa — tells a bit of every American city’s own history, too.
In 1951 in Santa Rosa, for example, the African American community finally found a center at the newly founded Community Baptist Church. At the end of the decade, children from the largely Black neighborhood of South Park were bussed to Montgomery High School, on the whiter, more affluent east side of the city.
This local history was on my mind as I watched a sold-out, mid-run performance of Fences — a highlight of Wilson’s Century Cycle that was revived not just for a 2010 Broadway run but a 2016 film, both with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in the lead roles. The story of a former Negro League baseball star now relegated to garbage pickup, and the subsequent resentment that he takes out on his family, is a Pulitzer-winning landmark of American theater.
In Sixth Street’s intimate black box Monroe Stage, the cast of this Fences flies along as smooth as a low-and-inside slider. As motormouth Troy Maxson, Keene Hudson seems to have studied Denzel Washington’s performance, and captures both the bravado and bitterness so crucial to the script. As son Cory, Mark Anthony could hardly be better cast, first hopeful and then physically filled with rage when his father denies his dreams.
Two actors are especially effective. Jim Frankie Banks wholly inhabits the role of Gabriel, the simpleminded brother of Troy who lives with a mental disability from a WWII head wound. And Val Sinckler, as Rose, expertly plays the supportive wife and mother — the glue holding together her fractious family — and delivers just the right note of pathos toward the play’s end. When she cries to Troy that “I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom,” one feels every month and year of that long wait.
