Theater review: MTC swings for the 'Fences' and falls a little short

By Sam Hurwitt IJ correspondent

Marin Theatre Company first ventured into the oeuvre of August Wilson in 2011 with "Seven Guitars," part of the late playwright's mammoth 10-play "Pittsburgh Cycle" or "Century Cycle," exploring African-American life in the Hills District of Pittsburgh, Penn., in each decade of the 20th century. Now MTC returns to Wilson's work with "Fences," winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for drama and Tony Award for best play.

Just as "Seven Guitars" is the 1940s installment of the cycle, "Fences" is set in the 1950s. The main character, Troy Maxson, is also in his 50s. Now working as a garbage man, Troy was a baseball player in the Negro Leagues when he was younger and bitterly resents never being allowed to play in the Major Leagues because of the color of his skin. Whenever any great player is mentioned, he scoffs that he played with guys who were way better than that guy. His son Cory is being recruited for college football and wants to play, but Troy won't let him pursue sports only to be cheated the way Troy was.

"Fences" has a lot of history in the Bay Area. It played San Francisco's Curran Theatre in 1987 on its way to Broadway, and Carole Shorenstein Hays produced both that Broadway production and the 2010 one that won a Tony for best revival. There have been many stagings of "Fences" at local theaters over the years, including TheatreWorks and Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. The Marin production is presented in association with the latter theater, San Francisco's most prominent African-American theater company, which is on a producing hiatus and offering its subscribers a "passport season" of relevant productions by other local theaters.

LHT artistic director Steven Anthony Jones also performs in the show as Bono, Troy's best friend, co-worker and drinking buddy. Jones brings a winning warmth and humor to the role of the indulgent pal who amiably pooh-poohs Troy's extravagant tall tales of having faced down Death and the Devil in nonmetaphorical fashion.

Troy is played with riveting intensity by Carl Lumbly, a Berkeley-based actor known for TV roles on "Alias" and "Cagney & Lacey," who has delivered a string of excellent performances lately at San Francisco Playhouse, Magic Theatre and other local theater.

Lumbly delivers Wilson's trademark long, poetic speeches beautifully, but his Troy Maxson is a man of many fascinating pieces that never quite come together into a cohesive whole. He's chatty and playful with Bono and with his wife, Rose, but he's the hardest of hard men with Cory (an upbeat and enthusiastic Eddie Ray Jackson), stern, pigheaded and overbearing. This compartmentalization is written into the character, but his emotional shifts seem reactive to the last thing that was said rather than building from moment to moment over the course of the play. And the more we learn about how he thinks and how he got to be this way, the less it excuses anything he does, so that by the time we're asked to think well of Troy despite everything, he's already used up all the goodwill he had.

Margo Hall makes an excellent foil for Troy as his good-natured wife, who tolerates a lot of nonsense with an indulgent shake of the head but doesn't hesitate to tell him to knock it off when needed. Tyee Tilghman is amusingly slick as Troy's eldest son, a nattily dressed (by Christine Crook) jazz musician. Chris Houston supplies a hectic but period-appropriate blaring jazz score. Adrian Roberts is compelling as the requisite addled mystic that's in every Wilson play, this time in the form of Troy's childlike brother with brain damage from the war. Alternating with Jade Sweeney, Marin City seventh grader Makaelah Bashir is sweetly shy as the little girl in the family.

While J.B. Wilson's set is pretty simple the facade of a brick house with what appears to be a lumpy cliff face behind it lighting designer Kurt Landisman maintains a base level of gloom through shifting times of day and night.

Despite some slow patches, the staging by out-of-town director Derrick Sanders hits most of the dramatic moments effectively, as well as the humorous banter. But here too there's a question of what all these intense moments add up to. There's some depth missing at the heart of this production, and it feels like what's missing may be its heart.

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Theater review: MTC swings for the 'Fences' and falls a little short