Fences

When you enter the Cort theater for the new production of August Wilson's "Fences," the set is in full view. It is an evocative set (another fertile home-setting set by the wonderfully prolific Santo Loquasto). We're in the backyard of a non-descript house in the Hills district of Pittsburgh, the setting for much of Wilson's oeuvre, in his epic 10-play cycle of the black experience in the 2oth Century. This is the one that covers the 50's decade.

As you sit admiring the set, with its wonderfully evocative tree downstage-right, and understanding it will all soon come to life--you are still not ready for the way it happens. All of a sudden (in my memory the lights hadn't even fully dimmed yet) Denzel Washington (Troy) and Stephen Mckinley Henderson (Bono) arrive, as if from nowhere, and fill the stage with life. I'm not talking about within minutes--I'm talking about right then and there, in the very first beats. By the time minutes have elapsed you are so steeped in the lives of these two characters that the broader context and implications you later contemplate (which is inevitable after a Wilson play) are already firmly felt. Viscerally, gladly.

The anticipation, the imagining of the great actor matched with the great role, that has attended Mr. Washington's starring role in this production still did not, could not really, have prepared us for the exquisite, preternatural way he inhabits the role. It is an ineffable thing, not one, I don't believe, another actor could possibly come to study, and hope to duplicate somehow. No, it is his. In my mind now, forever more. Denzel (come, on--he is Denzel, right; the Times style guide notwithstanding) uses the metaphor of baseball here, of stepping up to the plate to wrestle with his disappointment and resentment, to wrestle with the demons of his youth, to wrestle with death itself really, for all it has ever been worth. All I can say is this is the kind of performance, the kind of production, that comes along once every five or ten years--if that.

And that is saying something. Especially since my memory of the original, 1987, production is suffused with the booming performance of the great James Earl Jones. In fact, his performance, like that of Ethel Merman as Mama Rose in Gypsy, was thought at the time to be definitive (until Patty Lupone came along and snatched the thing away two years ago, and called it her own). So, to have this performance be so integral, so transporting--so knock-down, drag-out defining is beyond thrilling.

And, hey, what about last year's revival of Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone?" I felt it was better than the original as well. What's happening here? Are we absorbing Wilson as our poet-playwright in some new way? Has his lyrical way with us begun to cohere, to ferment? Has he planted himself, posthumously, in our hearts and in our canon in a deeper-reaching way? Is August Wilson the Shakespeare of our time (with apologies to the incomparable JL)?

I don't know. But I do know it is not Denzel alone who effortlessly gives wings to this production. Viola Davis (as Rose, his wife) is standing toe-to-toe with Denzel, and calling it even most of the time. Her natural swoon in the arms of her admiring husband in the first act holds only the slightest hint of any trouble that might inhibit it in the second. But the slightest hint is there for us to register. Come, on. I would be thankful for just that. But I needn't be--the delivery of her cathartic Act II speech has a power that seems to roil up from the depths of all despair. And Mr. Henderson, the Wilson veteran whose work in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and especially Jitney, is so seemless, so vital, provides a dimension of knowing in his lilting patois that feels like that of Wilson's very own sensitivity.

But it's Denzel's show. He is by turns irresistibly magnetic, forbidding and menacing--he fools us into accepting his defenses. He saves and ruins his son. And you are by the end bursting at the standing ovation seems to honor him for it.

Ron Gallen