Baron Kelly Directs August Wilson’s Fences at UW’s Mitchell Theater: Family Dynamics
Alphaeous Green Jr. (r) and Burgess Byrd star as Troy and Rose Maxson in Fences. They are juxtaposed in front of a set rendition by Kevin D. Gawley Design.
By Jonathan Gramling
August Wilson is one of the greatest playwrights that America has produced. His series of 10 plays, each depicting a decade, create a lyrical history of the soul of Black America, a history that has been felt and lived by many people.
On March 3-10, Baron Kelly, a UW-Madison theater arts professor, is bringing Wilson’s Fences to the Mitchell Theater in Vilas Hall. It was important to Kelly to bring Fences to a UW-Madison stage as a way to integrate the African American theater experience into the UW-Madison campus.
Fences is a very powerful play that is brought to life by the main characters, Troy and Rose Maxson played by Alphaeous Green Jr. and Burgess Byrd. While Troy is the main character of the play whose presence is felt in every scene whether he is on stage or not, on some levels the story is really about Rose. Set in 1950s Pittsburgh, Fences almost made me feel like a Peeping Tom as I watched unnoticed as the life of the Maxson family unraveled while members of the Maxson family continued to survive.
And the chief protagonist is Troy Maxson whose pent-up motions make him a bull in the china shop of the Maxson family, although it is because of him that the Maxson family is there at all.
“Yes, he did the right thing, in particular in contrasting to the way that his father fathered him,” Green said about Troy. “You even see it when Troy has conflict with his son. He is able to make a choice that he feels is right for him even if it isn’t necessarily the choice in these modern times that we wouldn’t necessarily want Troy to make the choice that he did. For me, there is just so much weight on him. In the 1950s, a professional athlete raised on a sharecropper’s farm, ‘You’re going to go to therapy? What?’ He so obviously needs to just talk to someone and find a place to be vulnerable enough to learn how to ask for help. But that’s not available to him. That’s not an option. The best option he had in terms of opening up and being vulnerable to someone would have been with his wife, Rose. And even when he gets close, he is so unfamiliar with that sort of intimacy.”
And then there is Rose who is the fabric that holds the family together, whose love rises above all of the injustices and hurt that are visited upon her. There is a Rose in every African American family somewhere.
“I think she is a perfect foil for him,” Byrd said. “It’s like a classic couple. She’s the foil. She’s heard all of the stories. It’s the other way, but it is like Lucy and Desi. Desi was the quiet one. Rose is kind of the straight person to Troy. She’s a woman who always wanted a home and a child and children. And he allowed her to have those things. He’s a working man, which is very important. I love that he prides himself in working and taking care of us as a family
unit. She is church going. She is fearless, spiritual in that way. What I really, really love about this role is that she finds her voice, which consists of a huge presence. It’s a ride. I love just being in that moment. For me, sometimes, I love it because I’m giving voice to a lot of people who don’t have a voice, who are afraid to speak up to their significant other. A lot of women during that 50s time period for women took care of the house and they didn’t say anything. Don’t explain; don’t complain. They are trying to keep up that part of domesticity while also standing up for what you believe in and what is right. That’s what I really like about the role. And I think she is the heart of the play. Also Rose’s lines back to Troy are probably what the audience is thinking as well. I think she is the perfect voice for that outsider looking in.”
Madison’s Baron Kelly plays a dual role in Fences. He plays Troy’s brother Gabriel who was permanently disabled due to a war injury that necessitated the insertion of a metal plate in Gabriel’s head. Gabriel comes across so genuinely that one doesn’t realize Gabriel was played by Kelly until the curtain call.
And while he is best known for his considerable acting skills, Kelly directs the play.
“In academia, they ask, ‘What do you want to direct,’” Kelly said. “Or that is usually part of the job. And I didn’t know it had to be part of the job. I balked at it at first maybe 10-15 years ago. If I was ever going to direct something, I wanted to do something that I felt strongly about and spoke with me. I just didn’t want to do something just to do something. But I’ve worked with some of the world’s greatest directors. I used to just sit there and watch. By osmosis, I would pick up things. But it is different in academia. So I sort of learned how to navigate that system and try to work well with actors. You don’t usually get the chance to bring in union, professional actors. That’s how that started happening for me with all kinds of different plays, everything from Oscar Wilde to Shakespeare to you name it. I have a pretty wide swath because of my background and all.”
While people said, ‘Why Fences’ because in recent years, it has been produced by the now defunct Madison Repertoire Theater and American Players Theater, Kelly felt it was important to produce it on the UW campus where there has been a relative dearth of Black plays written by Black playwrights about Black people. And Fences is an excellent lead-off production.
“The themes that have been in most of these major dramas of father-son conflicts, husband and wife issues and all of that stuff, similar to the kind of plays that Arthur Miller wrote,” Kelly said. “Wilson has the kind of lyricism that Tennessee Williams was famous for. It’s fashioned after these classic dramas. I’m not saying that Wilson sat up and said, ‘I’m going to copy this like All My Sons.’ But he wrote these classic plays.”
Fences is hopefully the lead-off play of a series of Black-original plays.
“I think this campus needs to see these people on the stage so that other folks who are not part of this sort of community know that there is a place for them, that different kinds of stories can be told in the theater department,” Kelly emphasized. “Next season, there is going to be a play that a colleague is going to direct, Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress. Hopefully, this play is going to be the turnkey for that and other productions that are going to happen. It’s time. There are people on this campus who want it. And that’s the reason I put this through curricularly too because there are going to be high schools that are going to be coming here, about 3-4 high schools”
Fences is superbly acted and directed with Kelly setting the stage as the director and then the actors make it come to life in a humane way. By the end of the play, a tear or two has escaped my eye. While it is only on the Mitchell Theater stage until Friday, March 10th, one can be assured that this is not the last time that Fences will make an appearance on a Madison stage.
