Denzel, “Fences” and funny stories

My cousin Raymond was a “crack-you-up-in-a-minute” storyteller, even if he told the same story over and over again. Just like Denzel Washington in August Wilson’s wonderful play “Fences,” now on Broadway.

Raymond would tell about how we as children would put a saddle on our grandfather’s big fat pig and ride him “up the street” to the McElmurrays’ house (Not true). Or how I once chipped the tooth of one of the McElmurray daughters (she was too old to be playing with us children in the first place) while throwing a Mum deodorant jar (It was an accident).

His stories were Martin Lawrence funny. There was an earthy, natural feel to them, with embellishments that were so nonsensical that you laughed in spite of yourself.

I thought about Raymond and his tall tales while watching Denzel so superbly recount the stories Wilson wrote in “Fences.” A group of friends and I drove up to New York to see the show at the Cort Theater. It’s there until July 11. The play has been nominated for 10 Tonys, including best performances for Washington and Viola Davis (who plays his wife Rose) and best director for Kenny Leon. It is also making money, which can be a struggle for some Broadway plays: It has earned a record $1 million for eight performances.

“Fences” is part of Wilson’s “play-a-decade” series about black folks living in America during the 20^th century. It first premiered on Broadway in 1987 with James Earl Jones and Mary Alice in the title roles.

It takes place in Pittsburgh in 1957, and Washington plays the lead character, Troy Maxson, like a relic from a far-distant past. He could easily have been a face frozen in time in a team photo of the Pittsburgh Crawfords (Maxson never says who he played with) or some earlier Negro Leagues team, buried in a box on an auction-house table. Standing in place and unable (or unwilling) to go forward with his life. (Photo above is from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh website.)

The dialogue sings in the play – lyrical, poetic and from the gut (like the blues that influenced Wilson) yet real-sounding to the ears. Even if people don’t really talk like that, the dialogue rang true. And so did Washington and Davis: They acted like this was their life and their story, not lines memorized from a script.   

Denzel as Maxson is a frustrated garbage man who has seen his chance at a major league baseball career bypass him. He felt hemmed in by the fence that society had erected around him as a black man (and he had mentally built around himself and his family, particularly his son). He’s long beyond his ball-playing days – he came along “too early,” he told his buddy Bono – and he’s bitter, yet sane enough to pull out the stories inside of him.

I loved the entire play, but had a lot more fun in the first act, when Denzel was full of himself and electrified the stage with his 6-foot tall tales and his swagger. He wore out his family by retelling how he stared down Death, got money for a new house from the devil (who knocked on his door and offered a loan) and the exploits of his old dog Blue, whose stories came with a little squiggly hip dance. And we women in the audience loved seeing Denzel move his hips.

For me, it always came back to the words that Wilson put to paper. I heard snatches of dialogue that reminded me again of my cousin Raymond:

“I’m going to tell you the truth,” Maxson said, when he actually wasn’t.

“Bono like family,” referring to his best friend.

“Well all right,” he said to his son when the young man wouldn’t back down from him.

In interviews, Wilson (photo at left) said that he always listened to how black people talked. Here’s what he had to say in a 2000 interview with American Visions Magazine:

“The big thing I learned was to value and respect the way that black people talk; I’d thought that in order to create art out of it that you had to change it. It was Sekou Toure who said that language describes the idea of the one who speaks it. That told me that you can have different language because you have different people, and they’re describing the idea. I realized that there was nothing wrong with the way black folks talked; in fact, it was much more interesting to me than the so-called white dialog was.”

Raymond’s storytelling was silenced in May 2005 when he died from an infection in the hospital a day after surgery. He was 54. Some years before, I had given him a tape recorder and asked him to record some of his stories. As a journalist, I wanted to write them down, to put them into some form. He never did; maybe he figured he’d do it later or that his stories just weren’t good enough. By October, August Wilson had died of liver cancer at the age of 60.

I’m sure many of you have a Troy Maxson or a Raymond in your family. He or she is the one who parks a chair at a kitchen table and just starts telling stories, out loud, to anyone, drawing you into their madness because they’re just so funny and irreverent. Write and tell me about them, and send along one of their best oft-repeated stories.

Postscript: After the performance, we stopped at a coffee shop near the theater and in walked three of the cast members (no, not Denzel): Mykelti Williamson (who plays Maxson’s brother), Chris Chalk (who plays his son) and Stephen McKinley Henderson (who plays best friend Bono). They graciously spent some time talking to us and autographing our programs.

When Williamson (good-looking, tall and very at-ease with us) learned that the teacher in our group, Theresa Bramwell, was advisor for the drama club at her school, he offered to pose for a photograph for her to take back to her students. Her school in Northeast Philadelphia is  the site of actor Tony Danza’s upcoming A&E reality show called “Teach.” Danza is teaching an English class there now. Here’s Theresa with Chalk on the left and Williamson on the right.