Fences
Troy Maxson, a former Negro League baseball player now working as a garbage collector in 1950s Pittsburgh, builds a fence around his yard while his family life collapses. Wilson's masterwork in his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle. Troy is a tragic hero who can't stop fighting battles that are already over, and the fence is every metaphor at once.
A minority of readers say they could not connect to Troy, Rose or the rest of the family at all: “not one character I could connect to,” one writes, adding flatly “I could not find one thing that I enjoyed.” The play moves fast for how much family history it covers, and on the page some of the biggest turns land without warning; one reader complains “things happened way too fast” to build the weight the ending wants. Academic critics raise a related worry, that Wilson piles Troy with so much everyday domestic pettiness he never quite earns the myth-sized stature the play reaches for. A critic's own description, “daringly plotless, a pageant of character,” cuts both ways: without a strong cast carrying it, the words on the page can feel like a frame waiting for a production to fill in.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
