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May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson
This stimulating collection of essays, the first comprehensive critical examination of the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, deals individually with his five major plays and also addresses issues crucial for the role of history, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Bearden's collages, and the politics of drama. With essays by virtually all the scholars who have currently published on Wilson along with many established and newer scholars of drama and/or African American literature.
270 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1993
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About the author
Alan Nadel
24 booksAlan Nadel is the Bryan Chair of American literature and culture at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches literature and film. He is the editor of May All Your Fences Have Gates (Iowa, 1993) and the author of Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (Iowa, 1991), Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age, Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan's America, and Television in Black and White America: Race and National Identity.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 16, 2025
“the inscription August Wilson wrote in my copy of his plays: ‘May all your fences have gates.’ Everything we know of history is circumscribed by fences. From the walls of the womb and the bars of the crib to colonial maps and the Berlin Wall, we can chart human civilization in the dust or shadow of fences, and thus the frame of our proscenium may possibly stand as the sign of history, that is, of the fence opened by the gateway of drama.”
- Alan Nadel, Preface.
Anne Flèche The History Lesson :
“History is a moment Wilson’s characters can never catch with; they have to keep going back and starting again. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone works this idea into its title. It seems conscious of O’Neill, in fact, in the punning title, so similar to that of The Iceman Cometh, the period (1912), and boarding house setting. And Iceman’s explicit concern is precisely with the inability of its characters to inhabit the present. Stuck happily in an alcoholic time warp, they make attempts to sober up and leave the bar—to enter history—that result in the loss of their historical consciousness. . . .the desire of O’Neill’s characters to go out of the bar and to act, to become real, to be authentic, is killing.. . .my purpose here is to place O’Neill as a part of the history of Wilson’s drama and O’Neill’s reflections on drama and history as a mirror for Wilson’s own concerns.”
“Herald Loomis does find his wife, via Selig, but this too is the opposite of a reunion: he was only looking for her to say good-bye. [hence the title: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone] is about misplaced persons.”
“In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom…Wilson takes on directly the importance of improvisation and the problem of authority and authenticity.”
Sandra Adell Speaking of Ma Rainey:
“Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey was born on April 26, 1886….she had already become the most popular female down-home blues singer…represented the epitome of black female wealth, power, and sensuality…An important feature of Ma Rainey’s performances was a large cardboard replica of a Victrola from which she would emerge…but in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom it becomes, at least implicitly, the technical instrument that detaches the down-home blues singer from the domain of the blues tradition. The Victrola makes it possible for Ma Rainey’s voice to be heard in places other than the great circus tents where she usually performs. One no longer has to be there to experience Ma Rainey coming out of the Victrola; all one needs is the phonograph record…and to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, it ‘enables the original to meet the beholder halfway’. What it cannot reproduce is…the ‘aura’ or the presence, in time and space, that guarantees an object —be it a painting, a choral performance, or a staged performance—its uniqueness and singularity.” (p 53)
John Timpane Filling the Time: Reading History in the Drama of August Wilson:
“In Fences, baseball operates metonymically , as a metaphoric stand-in for the troubled changes of 1957 (court-ordered desegregation; Eisenhower sending troops to enforce integration at Little Rock; the KKK castration of a bkack man in Alabama; Satchmo canceling a tour of the USSR saying, ‘the way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell…’; and, of course, Willie Mays.”
Alan Nadel: Boundaries, Logistics, and Identity: The Property of Metaphor in Fences and Joe Tuner’s :
“The idea of a fence is inextricable from the idea of property…the act of naming is fence-building; it is giving propriety to the named…this act of naming is the source of all rights…the unnamed have no properties and therefore cannot claim rights…In America, one of the privileges of being human is that one cannot be treated as property…Property has no rights…A fence, then, is a sign of property rights…In antebellum America, race or skin color was just such a fence. It served to separate blacks from humans, denying blacks the properties of humans and giving to humans property rights over blacks.”
“The Mason-Dixon Line, no longer literal, became the universal metaphoric fence that marked the properties of race as criteria for human treatment…he describes Troy Maxson’s struggle* to build a fence around his property and thus create a site in which his property can be considered human…His name, Manson, suggests a shortened ‘Mason-Dixon’…”
[chattel vs serfs]
“And if, as I have suggested, the name ‘Maxson’ suggests this imposition from the outside [the Line], the name ‘Troy’ suggests the creation of a defensive wall, the internal resistance against alien assaults, with each assault being the precursor of Death.”
To be honest, I got a bit bored with their collection of essays; many overlapped and plowed the same ground particularly in their early parts, presenting histories and and background, though I suppose this is somewhat unavoidable with collecting various essays. I wonder, also, in part, if my boredom was due to Wilson’s plays speaking outright and not needing a whole lot of explanation.
3.5
- Alan Nadel, Preface.
Anne Flèche The History Lesson :
“History is a moment Wilson’s characters can never catch with; they have to keep going back and starting again. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone works this idea into its title. It seems conscious of O’Neill, in fact, in the punning title, so similar to that of The Iceman Cometh, the period (1912), and boarding house setting. And Iceman’s explicit concern is precisely with the inability of its characters to inhabit the present. Stuck happily in an alcoholic time warp, they make attempts to sober up and leave the bar—to enter history—that result in the loss of their historical consciousness. . . .the desire of O’Neill’s characters to go out of the bar and to act, to become real, to be authentic, is killing.. . .my purpose here is to place O’Neill as a part of the history of Wilson’s drama and O’Neill’s reflections on drama and history as a mirror for Wilson’s own concerns.”
“Herald Loomis does find his wife, via Selig, but this too is the opposite of a reunion: he was only looking for her to say good-bye. [hence the title: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone] is about misplaced persons.”
“In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom…Wilson takes on directly the importance of improvisation and the problem of authority and authenticity.”
Sandra Adell Speaking of Ma Rainey:
“Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey was born on April 26, 1886….she had already become the most popular female down-home blues singer…represented the epitome of black female wealth, power, and sensuality…An important feature of Ma Rainey’s performances was a large cardboard replica of a Victrola from which she would emerge…but in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom it becomes, at least implicitly, the technical instrument that detaches the down-home blues singer from the domain of the blues tradition. The Victrola makes it possible for Ma Rainey’s voice to be heard in places other than the great circus tents where she usually performs. One no longer has to be there to experience Ma Rainey coming out of the Victrola; all one needs is the phonograph record…and to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, it ‘enables the original to meet the beholder halfway’. What it cannot reproduce is…the ‘aura’ or the presence, in time and space, that guarantees an object —be it a painting, a choral performance, or a staged performance—its uniqueness and singularity.” (p 53)
John Timpane Filling the Time: Reading History in the Drama of August Wilson:
“In Fences, baseball operates metonymically , as a metaphoric stand-in for the troubled changes of 1957 (court-ordered desegregation; Eisenhower sending troops to enforce integration at Little Rock; the KKK castration of a bkack man in Alabama; Satchmo canceling a tour of the USSR saying, ‘the way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell…’; and, of course, Willie Mays.”
Alan Nadel: Boundaries, Logistics, and Identity: The Property of Metaphor in Fences and Joe Tuner’s :
“The idea of a fence is inextricable from the idea of property…the act of naming is fence-building; it is giving propriety to the named…this act of naming is the source of all rights…the unnamed have no properties and therefore cannot claim rights…In America, one of the privileges of being human is that one cannot be treated as property…Property has no rights…A fence, then, is a sign of property rights…In antebellum America, race or skin color was just such a fence. It served to separate blacks from humans, denying blacks the properties of humans and giving to humans property rights over blacks.”
“The Mason-Dixon Line, no longer literal, became the universal metaphoric fence that marked the properties of race as criteria for human treatment…he describes Troy Maxson’s struggle* to build a fence around his property and thus create a site in which his property can be considered human…His name, Manson, suggests a shortened ‘Mason-Dixon’…”
[chattel vs serfs]
“And if, as I have suggested, the name ‘Maxson’ suggests this imposition from the outside [the Line], the name ‘Troy’ suggests the creation of a defensive wall, the internal resistance against alien assaults, with each assault being the precursor of Death.”
To be honest, I got a bit bored with their collection of essays; many overlapped and plowed the same ground particularly in their early parts, presenting histories and and background, though I suppose this is somewhat unavoidable with collecting various essays. I wonder, also, in part, if my boredom was due to Wilson’s plays speaking outright and not needing a whole lot of explanation.
3.5
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