Fences is a character study of a flawed man whose defects aren’t entirely of his own making. Troy Maxson is an African-American garbage collector who spent 15 years in jail for killing a man in a robbery, who afterwards became a star baseball player in the Negro Leagues, and who then married a good woman with whom he settled down to raise a family.

But he’s also a tyrant and a philanderer, a man who doesn’t love his needy son, and who takes on a mistress with whom he has another child.

As one expects in an August Wilson play, society’s culpability in creating such a person is not to be ignored. Wilson makes it clear enough that Maxson’s stifling of his son’s opportunity to play college football is a result of the bitterness he still feels toward white team owners who wouldn’t let him into the major leagues (in the pre-Jackie Robinson days). And he has Maxson himself attempt to explain to his incensed wife Rose that he took a lover because after 18 years “on first base” he desperately needed an experience that could convince him he’d made some sort of personal progress.

Wilson in several of his plays examines the perversions that occur to characters who are prevented from fully expressing their talents, and Troy Maxson is one of these: a gifted, charismatic man to whom white American society has offered next to nothing. As Langston Hughes famously said, a dream deferred can fester or stink — or explode.

In the fine American Stage production of Fences, Maxson, wonderfully played by Evander Duck, Jr. (above, center, with Travus Leroux and Jayne Trinette), is already poisoned by deferred dreams when we first meet him.

This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2009.