There’s nothing true about this play that I didn’t say about the others. It’s well-written and the language is so perfectly captured I can hear it being said as I read. And like the other plays, something I didn’t mention, because it was originally cast with a couple of well-known actors, I can even imagine it being performed with specific faces and specific voices. This is the earliest, by chronology, of August Wilson’s Century Cycle, taking place in 1904. Like I mentioned in the Faulkner […]
I ain’t no Black Widow nothing!
I finally got the weird middle aged man at the library to talk with me. He’s mostly kind of chilly, but when I came up with an armload of August Wilson plays, it worked for him. He told me all about how people have been checking out his plays recently, how he read about Denzel Washington’s directorial choices for the new movie, all kinds of stuff. I really like reading the cast lists for these plays from the 1980s. In this one, we had Charles […]
Spoiler: The Piano is a symbol
There’s a moment in Fences where Troy and Bono are telling a story about eating watermelon. In this play, we begin with two characters having secured a truckload of watermelons in order to sell. A student asked me this week what’s the deal with the watermelons. So I asked her “Hey, what’s the deal with the watermelons?” She said, maybe it’s to make the white people in the audience feel really uncomfortable? I said, I didn’t know the answer, but I think she’s onto something. One […]
Fences – A Re-re-re-re-re-review
I re-read Fences fairly regularly, every couple years or so, because I have taught it a few times in the past. With the movie coming out, I decided to teach it again this year, and my AP Literature students are currently reading it. What I plan on doing with this short review is to go over some of the considerations I have talked about in class and how we approached some of our conversations about the novel. If you haven’t read or seen Fences, I do recommend […]