Photo: Dan Boud
"I can only try my best to write about what an incredible privilege it is to be able to offer a classic like August Wilson's Fences up to you, the audience, here on Gadigal Land."
An excerpt from Shari Sebbens' Director's Note for Fences on stage now at Wharf 1 Theatre until 6 May 2023.
Oftentimes the writers I’m most drawn to make the personal political and the political so deeply personal. I can only try my best to write about what an incredible privilege it is to be able to offer a classic like August Wilson’s Fences up to you, the audience, here on Gadigal land. August Wilson did not write what he considered his first play, Jitney, until he was thirty four years of age.
After realising his first three plays took place over three separate decades, August decided to continue this pattern and over the next twenty six years he would complete The American Century Cycle, ten plays in total, each exploring the experiences of the Black American community, all but one (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) set in his beloved
hometown of Pittsburgh.
August, originally a self-taught poet, took it upon himself to sit and listen to the old folk that settled into the pool halls, restaurants and card tables around The Hill District of Pittsburgh. It was there that he learnt storytelling in its purest form, the oral tradition, and it was there that his ear for dialogue was tuned.
His love for his community, his people, his Blackness, is what leaps off every lyrical page of his plays. In week four of our rehearsals, the Fences company was fortunate enough to zoom into Pittsburgh from STC’s Rehearsal Room North to yarn with Edwin Kittel, August’s younger brother.
Edwin shared the most succinct advice any cast could receive: "Acting is FUN. SO, GO AND HAVE FUN!!!". He also drove home the significance of oral history in the Black American community, a tradition not dissimilar to the recording of history within my own community and many other Aboriginal communities here in Australia.
To take the art of storytelling from your own community to the stage requires great focus and finesse, attributes August did not shy away from. Nor did he shy away from the politics of his time or his elder’s time or his Ancestor’s time before that.
Each play brought forth new stories, new characters, and complex depictions of the familiar tones and intricacies of Black life; nuances lost in or erased by the chasm of the racial divide upon which America is founded. At the core of each play is a reaching upwards and inwards to address that divide, not in a reconciliatory gesture but as a means of self-determination.
August Wilson put Black people in the centre of the story, and his dedicated choice to let whiteness in, only at the periphery, is what allows his characters the room to expand and be seen as whole and complex. August said "My plays are ultimately about love, honour, duty, betrayal" as the often regarded yet largely unquantifiable canon of classic plays often is.
Photo credit: Daniel Boud
Read more in the program, available for purchase at The Wharf Box Office or at The Theatre Bar at The End of the Wharf for $15, or $14 if you pre-purchase with your tickets online or over the phone.