August Wilson's Fences

"I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom. And it didn't take me no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn't never gonna bloom."

Troy, the patriarch of the Maxon family, is hardened, flawed and unsentimental, and is yet the perfect depiction of picking survival over dreams. For Troy, gone are the days of youth when he was a former star of the baseball league. His manoeuvring of the tense racialised backdrop of mid-20th century Pennsylvania results in failed relationships with both his wife Rose and his son Cory who now dreams of becoming a baseball star like his father once was: an ambition Troy hopes to kill in the name of pragmatism.

Fences has often been lauded by critics as the gem in August Wilson's 'The American Century Cycle'.