‘Fences’ falters in its bellowing

Wednesday, April 7, 2004

Sustaining one note may bring down the house at the opera, but it’s deadening at the theater. August Wilson’s “Fences,” a play of music, rage and coiled rhythm, becomes a pedantic harangue in Round House Theatre’s production, directed with a heavy hand by Thomas W. Jones II.

Part of Mr. Wilson’s 10-play cycle chronicling African-American life in each decade of the 20th century, “Fences” takes place in the 1950s. The bebop jangle of Mr. Wilson’s language reflects the zeitgeist of that era, a time when America was caught between familiar comforts and sweeping change. At times, the play is as tender as a ballad sung by Sarah Vaughan; at others, it is as jumpy and sublime as a riff by John Coltrane.

Very little of this musicality comes through in Round House’s staging, which is like the nonstop blat of a horn. By focusing on the anger of the main character, Troy Maxton (Hassan El-Amin), a talented baseball player in the Negro Leagues who never got a chance in the majors, the play loses the beat poetry of Mr. Wilson’s dialogue and its epic sense of tragedy.

Troy is a big man in every sense of the word. As his wife, Rose (Nadine Mozon), says, he fills up a room and leaves little space for anyone else. Mr. El-Amin ably conveys the easy physical strength of the character; with a small flex of his muscles, you know this is a man to be reckoned with.

But he charges onstage like a bull, bellowing and hollering, immediately staking his claim as a tyrant — a stance from which he never retreats. When an actor comes onstage yelling, where is there to go emotionally from there? What resources can you draw upon in the second act, where the real fireworks lie? Troy’s one-track rage wears you down early, and it also dilutes the dimensionality of the character.

You quickly become sympathetic to the people he pushes around — his wife; his sons, Cory (Lance Coadie Williams) and Lyons (Jeorge Bennett Watson); his oldest friend, Bono (Donald Griffin); and his mentally damaged brother Gabriel (Frederick Strother).

Never mind that Troy has a mighty big ax to grind — a childhood with a mean and distant father (sound familiar?) and a career in baseball thwarted by racism. Instead of seeing a great man compromised by hardness, anger and a bellicose resistance to change, all we see is a bully. He is not a heroic figure, merely a nasty one.

The theme of counting, being counted and acknowledged, runs through Mr. Wilson’s work. Although many of his male characters are not classically noble — they often drink, take drugs, have prison time in their past and present or have women on the side — there is such a careful accreting of the details, such a vital attention paid to how they think and act, that their lives add up to something in the end. Mr. Wilson seems to demand that these men have worth. They may not be exemplary, but they still count.

You never get that sense with Mr. El-Amin’s Troy, who seems like a waste of energy and a threat to those he supposedly loves. This skewing of “Fences” makes the play veer into melodrama, squabbling on the earth when it should be reaching for the stars.

The production is somewhat redeemed by the other characters, notably Mr. Watson, both slick and needy in his portrayal of Lyons, a jazz musician and scam artist in the making. Mr. Griffin gives a canniness and gruff wisdom to the long-suffering character of Bono. Mr. Strother wins points as the most game actor in town with his fearless acting in the role of Gabriel, a role that requires him to execute a startling, quasi-African dance at the end.

Round House’s brick-row-house set, with its splintery wood steps and dirt back yard, is up to its usual high standards. It looks real and lived-in, striking a note of authenticity that this staging of “Fences” otherwise lacks.