HU145: Theatre Studies: Fences

Study guide produced by the Court Theater for their production of Fences which ran Jan 12, 2006 - Feb 19, 2006

A thorough study guide of the play.

In this video from August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand scholars discuss Fences, the Tony Award-winning drama about a former Negro League baseball player and his family. The video features performances of two scenes from the play along with critical commentary.

Film and stage actor James Earl Jones is interviewed by film director Sam Pollard in this behind-the-scenes footage from August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand. In 1987 Jones won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role in Fences, for which August Wilson won a Tony Award for Best Play and the first of two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

In 2005, playwright August Wilson published the final installment of his ten-part magnum opus, Pittsburgh Cycle—ten separate but thematically linked plays about African-American life, each set in a different decade of the 20th century. “I think my plays offer white Americans a different way to look at black Americans,” he told The Paris Review. The plays went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. In this program, filmed before Pittsburgh Cycle was complete, Wilson discusses his ongoing work on the project. Part of the series In Black and White: Six Profiles of African American Authors. (22 minutes). You will need to login to view this.

Filmed on the set of Two Trains Running, one of America’s leading playwrights traces his work back to a troubled childhood in a Pittsburgh ghetto. His ongoing project to write a play on African American life set in each decade of the 20th century is one of the most ambitious endeavors in American theatrical history. In this program, he describes his award-winning plays Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as passing down the wisdom of the African American community. "It’s almost as if I’m connecting myself with something larger than myself and I trust that. It’s part of what I call the blood’s memory." (22 minutes)

August Wilson (1945 – 2005) was an award-winning American playwright whose work illuminated the joys and struggles of the African-American experience in the United States during the 20th century.