Cory asks his father why he has never liked him, and Troy answers by listing what he provides: food, shelter, clothes, a roof over his head. For Troy, these obligations are not separate from love; they are how love is proved. Across Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wilson asks what happens when one person’s hard-won understanding of care, survival, or responsibility fails to answer what another person is actually asking for.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Cory Maxson asks his father a simple question, but Troy hears it through an entirely different understanding of what a father owes a son. “How come you ain’t never liked me?” Cory asks after their argument about football. Troy does not answer by naming affection, pride, pleasure, or tenderness. He asks what law says he has to like anybody, then turns the conversation into a cross-examination. He corrects Cory’s posture and speech, requires the sir, and begins assembling the evidence of his fatherhood: Cory eats every day. He has clothes. He has a roof over his head. When Cory hesitates and supplies the conclusion the sequence seems to invite—“Cause you like me”—Troy rejects it. He provides because Cory is his son and because providing is his responsibility (Wilson, Fences, 1.3).

The answer makes sense within the life Troy has lived. Food can be put on a table. Rent can be paid. A roof can be kept over a child’s head. These acts have weight because they require work, money, and endurance, and Troy has spent his adult life performing them. Cory asks about feeling, but Troy translates the question into the terms by which he has learned to recognize love: Did I feed you? Did I house you? Did I do what a father is supposed to do? His answer is sincere because he believes those acts carry the meaning Cory is asking for.

His own account of his father makes the scene harder. Troy remembers a brutal man, but he also remembers that the man stayed with his eleven children and worked because he felt responsible for them (1.4). Troy gives him credit for staying without confusing responsibility with humane treatment. He already knows, then, that a father may fulfill one obligation and fail another. What Cory asks him to do is apply that distinction to himself. Wilson begins with a man whose experience has taught him something true about duty and then places another person in front of him whose need asks more of that knowledge than it can supply.

So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
— Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son”

What Troy Owes: Fences

Troy’s argument against Cory’s football scholarship gives that problem consequences for Cory’s future. Troy knows what it means to have ability and still find the door closed. He was a gifted ballplayer who never reached the major leagues, and his distrust of white institutions is grounded in experience rather than theory. He also has a practical alternative in mind for his son: learn a trade, keep steady work, build a life around something dependable. Nothing about that position is foolish. What changes its force is the conclusion Troy draws from it. The history he knows becomes a forecast for Cory, and warning becomes decision. Troy does not merely tell his son that the world may close doors against him; he decides which doors are worth approaching.

Wilson places contrary evidence inside Troy’s own life. In the first scene, Troy asks why Black men lift the garbage while white men drive the trucks (1.1). Later, he becomes a driver himself (1.4). His promotion does not cancel the racism he has known, but it does mean that Troy has watched an institutional barrier move after someone challenged it. He now knows both that exclusion can be real and that exclusion is not always final. Cory’s opportunity asks him to live with that uncertainty. Instead, Troy lets the injury of the past settle what the present can mean. Baseball failed him, so football becomes suspect before Cory is allowed to discover what this particular opportunity might hold.

That is also where Hagen’s objective becomes useful for the actor playing Troy. In the earlier exchange, Troy needs more than obedience; he needs Cory to recognize that his father has done right by him (Hagen, “The Objective”). His corrections of posture, speech, and address belong to a sincere understanding of paternal respect, while also keeping the conversation on ground where he can prove his case. The actor need not divide principle from defense. Troy’s defense works because he believes the principle. Cory’s “Cause you like me,” in turn, should come from listening rather than strategy. Meisner’s emphasis on receiving matters because Cory is trying to follow the logic his father has given him. If the food, the clothes, and the roof are Troy’s evidence, perhaps love is what they prove. The pain of the exchange lies in the fact that Cory finds affection inside Troy’s definition of duty and Troy refuses the translation.

Rose later answers the same habit of interpretation from inside the marriage. When Troy tells her that Alberta is pregnant, he explains the affair through baseball. Marriage has been the safety of first base; the affair has offered the possibility of stealing second. The metaphor casts Troy as the runner, measures the risk as his, and turns eighteen years of marriage into a position from which he has wanted release.

Rose answers with two words that change the scale of his story: “with you.” She gave eighteen years of her life to stand in the same place with him. Troy has described those years as though the marriage were chiefly an experience he endured, and Rose restores herself to the account. She planted herself in him, she says, and waited to bloom even after she knew the ground was hard and rocky. Troy remembers restriction; Rose remembers investment. They are speaking about the same eighteen years, but Troy’s metaphor has made his experience large enough to obscure hers.

Wilson does not need either account to be false. Troy may genuinely have felt confined. Rose genuinely built her life there. The conflict lies in Troy’s assumption that his experience can define the marriage as a whole. Rose’s answer reintroduces another life into a history he has narrated in the singular.

Then the argument becomes physical. Rose turns toward the house. Troy grabs her arm. “Troy, you’re hurting me.” Her sentence requires no metaphor. She tells him what his action is doing to her while he is still doing it, and Cory enters the yard while she is asking to be released (2.1). He does not enter in time to decide which account of the marriage is more persuasive. He sees his father holding his mother after she has said that he is hurting her.

The final quarrel between father and son returns to the material proof on which Troy has built so much of his authority. Troy invokes the house. He worked for it; he provided it; inside his understanding of fatherhood, those facts help establish his right to rule it. Cory answers that Gabriel’s war-injury money helped pay for the house. The correction does not erase Troy’s labor. It places that labor inside a larger history. Another man’s damaged body is also in the foundation of the property Troy names as evidence of what he alone has supplied.

The fight carries the claim of possession into the baseball bat. Troy backs Cory against the tree, Cory takes up the bat, and Troy responds, “That’s my bat!” (2.4). He takes it from him and raises it over his son, but does not swing. The restraint remains unexplained. Troy can order Cory out of the house and overpower him physically, yet at the edge of the blow he stops. Wilson leaves that limit in Troy’s behavior rather than giving him language for it.

After Cory leaves, Troy takes a batting stance and challenges Death again. An opponent such as Death can be named, faced, and fought. Cory has demanded something less manageable. Troy knows what happened to him. What he cannot quite grant is that Cory’s life may produce evidence Troy does not yet possess.

What Is Handed Down: The Piano Lesson

The Piano Lesson begins with an inheritance that no one can possess simply. The piano belongs to the Charles family, but even that sentence leaves the important questions unanswered. It was acquired by a white slaveholder, altered by an enslaved craftsman, taken from the Sutter house by descendants of the people whose lives were carved into it, mourned over by one generation, and claimed by the next for incompatible purposes. Boy Willie wants to sell it; Berniece refuses. Both know the history. Their quarrel concerns what knowing that history entitles either of them to do.

Wilson establishes the difficulty while the story is still being told. In 1.2 Doaker begins explaining the piano to Lymon while Boy Willie continues arguing that Berniece has no greater right to the instrument than he does. Doaker has to ask for enough room to finish. Wining Boy supplies a detail, and when Doaker checks it with him, Wining Boy answers, “You telling it” (Wilson, The Piano Lesson, 1.2). One man tells, another remembers, the first resumes. The history reaches the audience through corroboration while a claimant is already arguing over its disposition.

The story itself makes possession unstable. Robert Sutter acquired the piano by trading away an enslaved woman and her son. When his wife, Miss Ophelia, missed them, Sutter ordered the woman’s husband, Willie Boy, to carve their likenesses into the instrument. The commission attempted to replace people with images. Willie Boy obeyed it and then exceeded it, carving other members of the family and scenes of births, deaths, marriages, and daily life until the instrument carried a record Sutter never asked for.

Doaker crosses the room as he tells the story and points out the faces. Wining Boy distinguishes the first Boy Charles from the men who later carry his name. The history therefore takes shape person by person rather than remaining an abstraction about slavery. Sutter could claim the piano through purchase. Willie Boy made the record that gives the instrument its meaning. The two histories occupy the same object.

Boy Willie inherits that object with a plan. He has money saved, a truckload of watermelons to sell, and an opportunity to buy land once owned by the Sutter family. The piano would supply what he still lacks. His proposal therefore has a historical logic of its own: the descendants of people who were treated as property could turn the value of that history into property they own themselves. He does not want to forget the past. He wants to make it work for the living.

The plan depends, however, on making the family record saleable. The carvings help create the piano’s value, and that value becomes useful only if someone outside the family is willing to buy the instrument that carries them. Boy Willie’s answer to the past is energetic and future-facing, but its very practicality raises the question at the center of the quarrel: can one heir convert a shared inheritance into something else because he knows what he wants that conversion to accomplish?

Berniece measures the cost differently. Her strongest evidence is Mama Ola, who polished the piano for seventeen years until, as Berniece remembers it, her tears became part of the wood (1.2). Berniece has seen what remembrance demanded of her mother. She knows the piano through Boy Charles’s death, Mama Ola’s grief, and the losses attached to the family’s possession of it. When Boy Willie describes the land he could buy, Berniece hears another proposed transaction involving something the family has already paid for.

Yet Berniece’s refusal to sell does not settle the problem of inheritance, because Maretha sits at the piano taking lessons without knowing much about the people carved into it. Berniece has preserved the object and withheld much of its history from her daughter. She has a reason. She knows how heavily that history sat on Mama Ola, and she does not want Maretha to carry the same grief. Her protection therefore comes out of intimate knowledge of the cost.

Boy Willie insists that the child should be told. His pressure is intrusive, but it exposes something Berniece’s preservation cannot solve: Maretha may inherit the piano without understanding why it was preserved for her. Doaker complicates both positions. He tells Lymon the history freely, refuses to overrule Berniece in how she raises Maretha, and later acknowledges Boy Willie’s claim to the piano while still ordering him to wait for Berniece before moving it (2.4). Knowing the history does not make Doaker its owner, and owning a share does not allow either sibling to dispose of the other’s.

The ending changes the argument because Berniece finally plays. Avery’s blessing has failed, Boy Willie is struggling with Sutter’s ghost upstairs, and Berniece sits at the piano and calls the dead by name: “I want you to help me” (2.5). She does not preserve the piano or sell it. She asks something of it.

That action releases possibilities the earlier quarrel could not. Willie Boy’s carvings, Mama Ola’s tears, and Boy Charles’s death remain part of the instrument, but Berniece no longer relates to that history only through guardianship and grief. She uses what has been handed down to answer a need in the present. Maretha, meanwhile, can hear the names attached to the keys she has been learning to play. History becomes something spoken and used in the room where the next generation lives.

Boy Willie stops on the stairs to watch, abandons the sale, and leaves Berniece with a warning that “me and Sutter” will both return if she and Maretha stop playing. His departure never becomes pure surrender. He gives up his plan for the piano and still tries to prescribe what should happen to it next. Wilson allows the transformation without pretending that inheritance has become simple. The family has found a use for what it received. The next generation will still have to decide how to carry it.

What Levee Knows: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the question moves into a recording studio where artistic knowledge exists inside an institution that controls the conditions under which the artist will be heard.

Ma Rainey has leverage and knows how to use it. She insists that her nephew Sylvester be paid for speaking the introduction, and when Irvin reports that the company intends to take the money from her share, she sends him back because the company still needs her signature on the release forms (Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Act II). Her authority is neither imaginary nor absolute. It exists because the company needs something only she can provide.

Levee’s position is less secure. His songs have attracted Sturdyvant’s interest, Irvin has instructed the band to use his arrangement, and those events give Levee reasons for believing that the session may lead somewhere beyond his place in Ma’s band. Cutler keeps telling him that Ma decides what the musicians play; Levee keeps hearing the white men’s encouragement as evidence that another route may be opening. The confidence the older musicians mock is therefore built partly on promises actually made to him.

When they tease him about the way he behaves around Sturdyvant, Levee tells them why he thinks he understands white men. His story begins with the men who raped his mother, moves through his own attack on them and the scar they left across his chest, and ends with his father pretending accommodation long enough to take revenge before being killed for it (Act I). Levee offers the story as evidence. He knows what open defiance can cost. He also knows that apparent submission may conceal another intention. The manner his bandmates read as servility is, in Levee’s account, a strategy inherited from a father who understood that survival sometimes requires an enemy to misunderstand what you are doing.

The story does not make the strategy safe. His father’s concealment gave him the opportunity for revenge and led to his death. Wilson allows both facts to remain in the story. Levee’s experience has taught him something real about racial violence and the dangers of showing one’s hand, but the knowledge offers no guarantee that he can read Sturdyvant correctly.

The quarrel about God in the second act moves differently. Cutler tells the story of Reverend Gates being humiliated by white men, and Levee asks where God was while a man who served him was being abused. Cutler answers with the threat of hell. The exchange rises until Cutler strikes him. Levee draws his knife and initially dares God to save Cutler, but the man in front of him soon ceases to be the real object of the attack. The memory of his mother’s prayers takes over, and Levee stabs upward at the God he accuses of abandoning her (Act II).

For the actor, the turn has to happen through what Levee receives. Cutler’s story, his threat, and finally the blow are events. The scene loses its danger if Levee enters it already playing the emotional destination. His anger finds a new object in front of the audience. Cutler, meanwhile, is left confronting a knife whose threat has suddenly opened onto an argument much larger than the quarrel between the two men.

The institution answers Levee more quietly. At the end of the session, Sturdyvant tells him that the songs are not what he wants and offers five dollars apiece for them. Levee asks what changed. When Sturdyvant says the songs did not sound right as the other musicians played them, Levee asks to play them himself (Act II). That request is more revealing than a demand for additional money would be. Levee wants his own performance to enter the evidence. Sturdyvant refuses the hearing and returns to the price. He is willing to buy the songs while declining the artist’s account of what the songs could be.

Levee has spent the play insisting that he knows how white men work. What he knows has been purchased dearly, but it does not tell him how this particular white man will act. Sturdyvant’s earlier encouragement was real enough for Levee to build hope on it and disposable enough for Sturdyvant to withdraw without consequence to himself.

What happens with Toledo afterward becomes more terrible if it retains the possibility of another outcome. Toledo steps on Levee’s shoe and apologizes. Cutler confirms that he did it accidentally. Levee removes the shoe and holds it up to show the damage. Toledo asks what else he wants. Levee does not answer with a remedy.

The apology and the question leave room for repair. Toledo’s mistake was real; so is Levee’s anger. When Toledo turns away to gather his belongings, however, Levee pulls him back by the shoulder and forces the shoe into his face. The other musicians stop giving the quarrel their attention, hoping the encounter will die if they refuse to feed it. For Levee, their withdrawal produces another injury: the thing he is demanding that someone look at is being left unanswered.

The tactics change while the need underneath them remains. First he wants acknowledgment of the damage. Then he wants attention to it. Finally he uses force to compel what neither apology nor withdrawal has given him. Hagen’s objective therefore lies beneath the individual demands rather than in any one of them (Hagen, “The Objective”), while Meisner’s discipline of reception requires Toledo’s apology and question to remain real offers that Levee might still take in (Meisner and Longwell). Wilson lets the possibility stay alive long enough for its destruction to matter. The man Levee kills is the man who apologized.

The Ground on Which He Stands

The recording studio gives institutional form to a problem the other plays often locate inside families. Ma and the musicians make the music, but they do not own the room, the equipment, or the commercial machinery that decides what the recording will become once it leaves their hands. Wilson addressed that division directly in his 1996 speech “The Ground on Which I Stand,” where he argued for Black theatre institutions capable of interpreting Black experience from within the culture that produced it (Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand”). His concern reaches beyond representation onstage. He is asking who has the power to decide which stories matter, what constitutes artistic value, and what assumptions will govern the encounter between a work and its audience.

That claim differs in an important way from Troy’s claim over Cory. Troy knows what happened to him and uses that knowledge to narrow another person’s choices. Wilson argues instead for a wider field of Black artistic authority: more artists and institutions able to create, interpret, disagree, and make judgments from within Black experience. His refusal to appoint himself spokesman for every Black American places a limit inside the argument. Cultural self-definition does not require a single definitive voice.

The plays enact that principle formally. Troy tells Cory what the world does to Black men, and Rose has another account of the life inside his house. Boy Willie knows what the piano means to him, while Berniece knows what it cost her mother. Ma understands the recording business with a clarity Levee has not yet acquired, but Levee’s ambition cannot simply be absorbed into hers. Wilson gives testimony weight by keeping it attached to the person who can actually testify to it.

Actors have to preserve that particularity. Hagen and Meisner provide useful tools for objective, obstacle, behavior, and response, but Wilson’s scenes also move through storytelling, boasting, interruption, humor, repetition, music, and the blues tradition, forms that carry histories of their own (Maley). Technique can clarify what a character is doing without replacing the form through which the character does it. Troy’s objective matters. So does the way Troy tells a story.

we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
— Gwendolyn Brooks, “Paul Robeson”

Conclusion

At Troy’s funeral, Cory and Raynell sing the song about Blue that each learned from him (Wilson, Fences, 2.5). Cory has returned to the house from which his father drove him and initially wants no part in the funeral. Raynell is the child of the affair that broke Troy and Rose’s marriage and knew Troy during a wholly different part of his life. They cannot be remembering the same father. Yet both know the song.

Their duet does not undo the harm Troy caused or resolve what they should make of him. Cory still carries what happened between them. Raynell’s presence still belongs to the history Rose answered with her eighteen years. The song passes between the children without requiring either of them to accept Troy’s account of himself.

Gabriel’s final action places another history beside theirs. He raises his trumpet to announce Troy’s passage into heaven, but no sound comes. He dances instead, and the stage directions open the gates. The brother whose war injury helped finance the Maxson house becomes the figure through whom Troy is finally released. Troy spent much of the play pointing to what he had supplied for other people. Wilson closes his life with an act performed by someone whose suffering had quietly helped supply him.

Berniece reaches the end of The Piano Lesson differently. She sits at the instrument, names the dead, and asks them for help. The carvings remain what they were. Mama Ola’s grief remains part of their history. Boy Charles remains dead. What changes is the use Berniece makes of what she has received. She neither sells the inheritance nor simply protects it. She brings it into the present.

That movement runs through all three plays. Experience leaves knowledge behind: knowledge of racism, work, grief, danger, family, institutions, survival. Wilson does not treat such knowledge lightly. His characters have often paid terribly for what they know. The difficulty begins when knowledge becomes a verdict—when Troy’s baseball past decides Cory’s football future, when one heir claims the right to determine what a shared inheritance must become, or when Levee assumes that surviving one form of danger has taught him how the next encounter will end.

What can be handed down is still considerable. A warning can be given. A story can be told. A song can be taught. The person receiving it must still live beyond the experience that produced it.

Troy taught the song to his children. Cory and Raynell sing it together. By the time their voices meet, it belongs to them too.

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Further Reading

• Hagen, Uta, with Haskel Frankel. Respect for Acting. Foreword by David Hyde Pierce. Wiley, 2008. See “The Objective” and “The Obstacle.”
• Maley, Patrick. After August: Blues, August Wilson, and American Drama. University of Virginia Press, 2019.
• Meisner, Sanford, and Dennis Longwell. Sanford Meisner on Acting. Vintage Books, 1987.
• Wilson, August. Fences. Plume, 1986.
• Wilson, August. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Plume, 1985.
• Wilson, August. The Piano Lesson. Plume, 1990.
• Wilson, August. The Ground on Which I Stand. Theatre Communications Group, 2001. Originally delivered in 1996.