With a voice like rolling thunder and the fierceness to back it up, Derrick Lee Weeden unleashed theatrical lightning at Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s opening of Fences, August Wilson‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning spotlight on Black America in the mid-20th century. So seamlessly did Weeden climb into the towering role of Troy Maxson that we forgot we were watching an actor. We were watching the character himself. A former baseball player in the Negro leagues, the now over-the-hill Maxson is restless and angry, blaming all his failures on being Black. His sons have grown up, Lyons (ML Roberts) trying to score music gigs and always in need of money, and Cory (Iyanu Olukotun) hoping for a chance to play football despite his dad’s hostility. Long married to his practical wife Rose (Carolyn Ratteray), Maxson spends his weeks toiling as a garbage man, and his weekends down at the neighborhood bar with his buddy Bono (Michael J. Asberry).
But this is no sitcom, and nothing is simple. Things are coming unraveled for all of them, even Troy’s sweet damaged brother Gabriel (Avondina Wills), wounded during the war and now reduced to trying to sell produce from a hand basket while raving about his close relationship with Saint Peter.
When he’s not taking snorts from a pint of gin, Maxson attempts to enlist his youngest son in sawing lumber for a fence he’s building for his wife. Bono, who loves Maxson despite his flaws, warns: “Some people build fences to keep people out . . . and other people build fences to keep people in. Rose wants to hold on to you. She loves you.”
Opening night’s audience loved him too. Weeden, most recently seen with SCS as Gloucester in the 2023 King Lear, owns the role of Troy Maxson. Weeden makes us feel every mistake he’s ever made, every regret that eats him up and fuels his barely containable rage. The stage seems to bulge as he unburdens his heart in language of Shakespearean beauty (but a whole lot rougher!). He even rages against death. “Death ain’t nothing. I done seen him. Done wrassled with him… Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.”
Maxson isn’t a man we can simply love, hate, or even fully understand. He’s human, flawed, funny, tragic, and ultimately, thanks to Weeden and his magnificence, unforgettable. As his mistakes come tumbling out in Wilson’s musical dialogue, he falls back on, “I’m doing the best I can.” And he is doing the best he can. But he’s done it his way, full of love, bad luck, a kind of ethics, hard work, and regret.
Despite the challenge of sharing the stage with such a masterful leading player, there were many fine performances. As the streetwise best friend Bono, Michael J. Asberry is funny and deeply touching. Avondina Wills hits it out of the park as the sweet, loony brother Gabriel. As Rose, Carolyn Ratteray has some of the best lines ever written about what it’s like to sacrifice for the person whose hard work sustains your own. “I took all my feelings, my wants and needs, my dreams . . . and I buried them inside you,” she tells Troy. Yet I longed for some toughness and more variation in her stage presence.
Director Susan Dalian‘s production is thoughtful, smart, and flush with juicy stage business. Everything works. Except the way it ends. Wilson’s play should have ended with Scene 4 of the Second Act, after Troy’s monstrous, drunken elegy to everything he wanted and everything he didn’t get. Fastball in the outside corner. Weeden’s vocal virtuosity, his shambling bittersweet power, his caged-animal roar as he confronts death— that was the ending to this epic drama.
But Wilson doesn’t end it there. He continues with the family gathering at the old house for Troy’s funeral. Perhaps this coda of a family re-organizing itself was meant to reinforce the largeness of his absence. And Maxson’s absence was huge. But Maxson’s story was Derrick Lee Weeden’s show. Stagecraft just doesn’t get any better than this!
Kudos to Charles Pasternak for edgy and excruciatingly timely programming.
Fences, by August Wilson, directed by Susan Dalian. Playing through August 28. www.santacruzshakespeare.org
