August Wilson’s Fences at The Laboratory Theater of Florida

August Wilson's Fences in collaboration with Theatre Conspiracy

Set in 1957 Pittsburgh against the backdrop of a changing America, August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning masterpiece is a fierce, deeply moving epic of the black working-class experience.

The drama centers on Troy Maxson, a charismatic garbage collector who rules his household with rigid authority. Once a legendary hitter in the Negro Baseball Leagues, Troy’s prime arrived too early for the integration of Major League Baseball. Embittered by broken dreams, he now structures his life around a physical and metaphorical fence in his backyard, fiercely protective yet trapped by his own past.

When his teenage son, Cory, gets a shot at a college football scholarship, Troy’s old traumas collide with his son’s future. Unable to see that the world is shifting, Troy blocks the boy's ambitions, threatening to tear the family apart. Watching the fractures widen is Rose, Troy’s fiercely loyal wife, who has spent eighteen years anchoring the household and swallowing her own desires to keep them whole.

As buried secrets and betrayals come to light, Fences delivers a raw, lyrical, and devastating exploration of the heavy burdens passed from fathers to sons, and the ultimate cost of survival.