Fences, 2013

by Katie Hahn, Cecily Lautenbach and Ahmed Said

Adaptation:

Our adaption is set in a small rural town in Texas in 2013. The main character Troy Maxson, a 53-year-old African American who works as a garbage collector, lives together with his wife Rose, a homemaker and also of African American decent, and their son Cory. The other supporting characters are Troy’s brother Gabriel, a war veteran who suffers from severe mental issues caused by a head injury he got as a soldier in Iraq which lead him to believe that he is the archangel Gabriel; Lyons, Troy’s son from a previous marriage; and Bono, Troy’s best friend and collegue.

In our adaption, Troy is an unadmitted homosexual who is struggling with his sexual tendency which he has never told anyone about. Because of the absolute intolerance of homosexuality among the catholic, Republican inhabitants of his Texas hometown he experienced when he grew up in Texas, Troy chose to marry Rose and concieve a son to avoid suspicion. However, his homosexual desires entail him having a secret affair with a man outside his marriage. However, his wife Rose is suspecting that her husband might be gay because he refuses to sleep with her, but keeps quiet about her suspicion because she deeply cares about her family and doesn’t want to destroy their lives.

In the first scene, Troy and his friend Bono are having drinks after work at Troy’s house. Bono talks about his suspicion that Troy might have an affair with another woman, which Troy denies, while Rose keeps quiet about her own suspicion of her husband’s homosexuality. Troy is angry at his son Lyons, who always borrows money from him, and Cory, who was supposed to help him with the fence he is putting up around the house.

In the following scene, Cory talks to his father about his plans to get married to a man and wants him to be a witness at the ceremony. Troy gets very angry, refuses to give his blessings to the marriage and tells Cory that he would ruin all their lives because of the discrimination they would experience with an admitted homosexual in their family. Cory is very upset because he was hoping for his father to be happy about his wedding plans, but Troy stubbornly does not back down from his argument and in the heat of the fight kicks Cory out of the house.

Subsequently, tragic strikes as the man Troy secretly had an affair with dies in a car accident and leaves his recently adopted baby daughter. Troy then admits to Rose that he has been sleeping with a man outside their marriage, and that the child of his affair is now fatherless. Despite having had suspicions for a long time, Rose is shocked but finally decides to adopt the baby, Raynell, and raise her, but tells Troy that he cannot count on her as his woman anymore.

In the last scene, seven years later, all the characters are gathered at Troy’s funeral. Troy died of heartbreak because of the death of his affair and his fights with his wife and sons. Cory, who is now married to a woman with whom he is expecting a child, initially refused to come to his father’s funeral because he never got over their fight, but his mother convinced him to pay a last respect to his father who, despite all his actions, still loved his son. The fence which Troy wanted to build is revealed to be finished, but Troy didn’t live to see it. The play ends with Gabriel, in his role as the angel, proclaiming to open the gates of heaven for Troy, saying that God loves all his children.

Analysis:

To update our play for a contemporary German audience, we decided to change the setting of the play to 2013. We thought that setting the play in our modern times would help the audience to better relate to its content, as especially younger viewers might not be able to fully understand the context of the original setting in the 1950s.

The original play focuses on the struggles of African Americans and, through its main character Troy, shows the hardships of black manhood during the time the play was set in, before the Civil Rights Act 0f 1964 which significantly changed the reality of black Americans. We felt that in a contemporary setting, this theme needed to be updated, as the situation of black people has changed significantly since the time the play was originally set in, especially because of the African American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s. Nowadays, blacks have the same rights as white people in the USA, therefore we searched for another theme that would convey the larger meaning Wilson’s play wants to convey. We chose homosexuality as the perfect motif for updating one of the play’s principal themes, that of the struggle of people belonging to a minority group why try to achieve equal rights for themselves. Homosexuals nowadays constitute a minority in the United States whose legal and social situation has significantly changed over the last years, but who nevertheless still don’t have the same rights as heterosexuals and are, by some people and especially in the more conservative states of the USA like Texas, where our adaption therefore is set, still not regarded as ‘normal’, equal members of society. We felt that Troy Maxson as an unadmitted homosexual would work perfectly to convey his struggle to a contemporary audience because during the time he grew up in our adaption, which would have been the 70s and 80s, homosexuals were not as widely accepted by society and did not have the same rights as the have nowadays in the 2010s. Troy is therefore unable to understand and accept the fact that the reality of homosexuals has changed and because of this does not condone his son Cory’s marriage to a man because this would have never been possibel for him as a young man, just as he was not able to accept the fact that black people’s rights had improved and that his son was now allowed to play football professionally as a black man in the original play.

Throughout our adaption we thus updated the plot and shifted the focus from a black man’s struggles in changing times to those of a homosexual man, but we decided to keep the original events - Troy’s conflict with his son, his affair and the adoption of his affair’s baby by Rose, and his funeral concluded by his mentally ill brother Gabriel – to maintain a clear reference to the play’s original plot. Therefore, the themes such as father-son conflicts, and Troy’s inner division between responsibility and his own freedom remain unchanged.

The funeral scene and thus the ending of our adaption was a very important factor for us that served to connect our adapted plot to the larger meanings of Wilson’s original storyline. We chose Cory to follow his father’s example and not openly live and acccept his sexual desires, just like he followed Troy’s footsteps in the original plot when he became a soldier instead of following his own dream of becomin a professional athlete. This way, the father-son relationship is kept as Wilson had intented it, and shows that despite the conflicts Cory had with his father, he still (consciously or unconsciously) listened to him. We also wanted Gabriel to play a significant role in the last scene because we felt that the ending of the original play was a particularly moving scene that let the play end in a mysterious way that kept the spectators thinking even after the play had finished. Gabe is proclaiming to open the gates of heaven for his brother and saying that God loves all his children was used by us to convey the meaning that besides Troy being an unlikeable character because of his attitude towards his loved ones, his struggles were still in some way understandable and his belonging to a minority does not make any difference when it comes to his worth as a human being.

We hope that through our adaption we were able to update the plot of “Fences” in a way that makes its larger themes and the characters’ struggles more understandable for a contemporary audience, while still keeping the meanings and twists of plot intended by August Wilson intact because those are, after all, what made “Fences” a theatrical masterpiece.