50 Fun Facts About Fences

In Fences, where did Troy Maxson learn to play baseball and first meet his friend Bono?

In prison, where Troy served fifteen years for killing a man during a robbery, he found both the game and his lifelong friend. He met Rose only after his release.

In Fences, what did Troy Maxson buy with the $3,000 his brother Gabriel received for a war wound?

The family home was bought with Gabriel's compensation, which is why Troy feels guilty now that his brother has moved out to rent a room elsewhere.

In Fences, a union complaint makes Troy the city's first Black sanitation worker promoted to what?

Truck driver is the job he wins, though Bono points out that Troy has never held a licence. Once behind the wheel he misses having anyone to talk to.

In Fences, how does Alberta, the woman Troy has been seeing behind Rose's back, lose her life?

In childbirth: the news comes by telephone just as Troy is setting out to visit, and he is left with a newborn daughter, Raynell, who has no mother.

Which actress won a Tony as Rose in the 2010 revival of Fences, then repeated the role on film?

Viola Davis already had a Tony for another August Wilson play, King Hedley II, before she took on Rose.

Who directed the 2016 film of Fences and starred as Troy, the role he had played on Broadway?

Denzel Washington told his cast and crew to make no decision that the playwright's words did not lead them to. He later produced a film of another August Wilson play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

In Fences, Cory returns for his father's funeral in the uniform of which branch of the military?

The Marines took Cory in after Troy threw him off the property; he comes back a corporal and, at first, refuses to attend the service.

The title of Fences also echoes a baseball phrase about a batter trying to hit what?

A home run clears the outfield wall, so a hitter who swings for the fences is going for everything at once, much as Troy does in life.

A film of Fences stalled for decades because August Wilson insisted that the studio hire what?

A Black director was his condition, because he believed the job needed someone who shared the culture of the characters. The film arrived eleven years after he died.

August Wilson set Fences, like most of his ten-play cycle, in which American city where he was born?

Pittsburgh is never named in the script, though its landmarks are; the only play of the ten set elsewhere is Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, in Chicago.

Fences opens with Troy and Bono drinking and swapping stories on which night, their weekly payday?

Friday is payday at the sanitation department, and the ritual of a shared bottle and tall tales returns throughout the play.

In Fences, Troy's elder son Lyons turns down sanitation work, hoping to make his living as what?

A musician is all Lyons wants to be: he plays jazz in local clubs and tells his father it is the one thing that gives his life meaning.

In Fences, what does Lyons usually want when he drops by his father's house on Troy's payday?

To borrow money, ten dollars this time: Troy grumbles and lectures, then lets Rose hand it over. Lyons later shocks him by trying to pay it back.

In Fences, which illness nearly killed Troy and inspired his tall tale of wrestling with Death?

Pneumonia is Rose's plain version of events; in Troy's telling he grappled with Death for three days and won.

In Fences, Troy spins a tall tale about buying what on credit from a stranger he calls the devil?

Furniture is the purchase, and Troy swears he has paid the devil ten dollars a month for fifteen years; Rose says he is lying.

In Fences, whose heavenly book does Gabriel say already has his brother Troy's name written in it?

Saint Peter keeps the book at heaven's gates, and Gabriel, who believes he is an archangel, is waiting for the day he tells him to open them.

In Fences, what does Gabriel Maxson carry everywhere, ready to sound it when Judgment Day arrives?

A trumpet, old and missing its mouthpiece, goes wherever Gabriel goes; since his head wound he has believed the archangel's task is his own.

In Fences, Gabriel keeps breaking off conversations to chase away which creatures only he can hear?

Hellhounds trouble Gabriel, who came back from the fighting with a metal plate in his head and the belief that he is an angel.

In Fences, Troy's brother Gabriel suffered his life-changing head wound in which conflict?

World War II left Gabriel with a metal plate in his skull, and Troy still rages that the government valued the injury at a few thousand dollars.

In Fences, when Cory asks for a television, Troy says they must first fix which part of the house?

The roof has gone ten years without fresh tar, Troy explains, yet he offers a deal: if Cory raises half the price of a set, he will match it.

Which pitching legend, named by Troy in Fences, finally reached the majors as a 42-year-old rookie?

Satchel Paige is the pitcher Troy boasts of hitting hard seven times, proof to him that the Negro leagues had the better arms.

Which slugger, who died months before baseball integrated, is a likely model for Troy in Fences?

Josh Gibson, regarded as the best hitter in Black baseball, died of a stroke at 35 without ever playing a game in the white major leagues.

In Fences, Troy Maxson orders his son Cory to win back his part-time job at which grocery chain?

A&P is also where Rose likes to shop because it is cheaper, while Troy stays loyal to Bella's, the neighbourhood store.

In Fences, Troy Maxson ends his son's football season by going behind Cory's back to speak to whom?

The coach is told that Cory may no longer play, so the college recruiter never gets his meeting, and Cory slams his helmet down in fury.

In Fences, Troy answers each act of defiance by Cory with a warning drawn from which baseball rule?

Three strikes and the batter is out: Cory collects his first for giving up his job and his second for shoving his father to protect Rose.

In Fences, Troy Maxson's brutal father raised eleven children alone while scraping a living as what?

A sharecropper more worried about his cotton than his children, he beat Troy unconscious at fourteen, and the boy left for good.

In Fences, the teenage Troy walks two hundred miles to which Southern port before riding north?

Mobile was only a stop: Troy rode on with other men seeking freedom up north and found city life harder than the farm he had fled.

In Fences, what does Rose insist truly kept Troy out of baseball's major leagues?

His age is Rose's answer: by the time the majors signed Black players, Troy was past his best, though he blames prejudice alone.

In Fences, Rose accuses Troy Maxson of signing papers that send his brother Gabriel to live where?

A mental hospital takes Gabriel on Troy's signature, the signature he refused to put on Cory's football papers, and Rose says half his brother's cheque now comes to Troy.

In Fences, what does Rose decide to do about Raynell, the daughter Troy has fathered with Alberta?

Raise her as her own is Rose's choice, made for the innocent child's sake, but in the same breath she tells Troy he no longer has a wife in her.

In Fences, what does Cory Maxson swing at his father during the fight that drives him away for good?

A bat, Troy's own, is the weapon: he wrestles it away, stands over his son ready to swing, then stops and orders Cory off his property.

In Fences, the song Cory and Raynell sing before Troy's funeral tells the story of what?

An old dog named Blue is its hero, and sharing the song with a half-sister he has only just met softens Cory toward the burial.

At the end of August Wilson's play Fences, what does Gabriel do when his horn fails to make a sound?

Breaks into a dance: a slow, strange ritual after which, the script says, heaven's gates stand open. In the film the horn sounds on his third try.

In Fences, what does Bono suggest is Rose's real reason for wanting a fence around the Maxson house?

To hold her family close: Bono reminds Troy that some fences are built to keep people in, a gentle warning about the affair with Alberta.

In Fences, what does Bono agree to buy his wife Lucille once Troy Maxson finally finishes the fence?

A refrigerator was Bono's half of a bargain between the two friends, and Troy later hears from Rose that he has kept his word.

By the final scene of Fences, what kind of offence has landed Lyons Maxson in the workhouse?

A check-cashing scheme put Lyons away, his girlfriend Bonnie has left him, and he is let out only long enough to bury his father.

Every scene of August Wilson's stage play Fences is set in which single location?

The Maxsons' yard holds all nine scenes, so the audience watches the fence go up board by board until it is finally finished near the end.

In the 2016 film of Fences, what kills Troy Maxson several years after he throws Cory out?

A heart attack fells Troy mid-swing at the rag tied to his tree, Rose tells Cory, with a grin still on his face.

In Fences, which habit of Rose's does Troy Maxson scold as throwing good dollars away?

Playing the numbers, the neighbourhood lottery, is Rose's modest hope; she reminds Troy that a local man's win bought him a restaurant.

In the last scene of Fences, what does young Raynell keep checking, hoping it has grown overnight?

A small garden is her project, and she pokes at it with a stick until she is told to give it a chance: a hint of new life on the morning of the funeral.

Which major honour for drama did Fences win, the first of two that August Wilson would collect?

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama arrived in the same season as the Tony Award for Best Play, and critic Harold Bloom later placed Fences in his Western Canon.

Which later August Wilson play about a family heirloom repeated the top drama honour won by Fences?

The Piano Lesson took the same honour in 1990 and, like Fences, eventually became a feature film, released in 2024.

Fences belongs to August Wilson's cycle of ten plays, each of which is set in a different what?

Decade by decade the cycle spans the twentieth century, and Fences, set in the 1950s, is its sixth chapter in story order.

Which actor won a Tony for creating the role of Troy Maxson in the original Broadway run of Fences?

James Earl Jones earned his second Tony for the part; his first had come for playing a boxer in The Great White Hope.

Who directed the original Broadway productions of both A Raisin in the Sun and Fences?

Lloyd Richards ran the playwrights' conference where the August Wilson script was first developed, and he won a Tony for directing it.

Fences had its world premiere at the repertory theatre of which Ivy League university?

Yale Repertory Theatre staged it two years before Broadway, after the script had been workshopped at a playwrights' conference in Connecticut.

The 2016 film Fences earned four Academy Award nominations but won in only which category?

Best Supporting Actress went to the film's Rose, while the screenplay nomination honoured August Wilson posthumously.

Which playwright reworked the Fences screenplay yet took only a co-producer credit on the film?

Tony Kushner, the author of Angels in America, built on the draft, but the finished film credits its late playwright as sole screenwriter.

The author of Fences was born Frederick Kittel; whose surname did he adopt to become August Wilson?

His mother's name was his choice: Daisy Wilson cleaned homes to raise six children, and he took her surname after his German immigrant father died.

Fences author August Wilson quit school when accused of plagiarising a paper on which leader?

Napoleon was the subject of his twenty-page paper; after walking out, the teenager educated himself at the public library, which later gave him an honorary diploma.