Seeing August Wilson’s play Fences on Broadway in 1987 was one of the highlights of my theatergoing life. This study of a 53-year-old garbageman named Troy Maxson—who struggles every moment to maintain his dignity and restrain the rage of a black man in 1950s Pittsburgh who was denied his chance to play baseball in the segregated major leagues—simply overpowered me. Troy is one of the stage’s master talkers, a peerless storyteller and raconteur despite (or perhaps because of) his illiteracy. He creates legends about the house he owns, the joys of his marriage to the wife he supports, and takes unabashed pride in the fact that he gets through the week without exploding at the daily humiliations of his existence.

Fences is the story of how Troy hurts and betrays everyone he knows and loves because he cannot talk himself out of the hunger for a larger life than the one he has painstakingly, and even heroically, built. Fences is constructed on the model of Death of a Salesman, but while it doesn’t quite match Arthur Miller’s play for raw power, it does not have to strain for the social significance Miller sought to layer falsely onto his small family tragedy. Willy Loman is not undone by powerful forces; he is, in the end, a weak and deluded man. Troy Maxson is a man with greatness inside him brought down low by a structural social injustice August Wilson does not need to spell out for us.