Tom Fougerousse
Baron Kelly of the UW Department of Theatre and Drama is working to diversify the plays produced; the current production is 'Fences' by August Wilson.
“It’s taken me a while to come back,” says Baron Kelly, Vilas Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Drama at UW-Madison.
Appointed in 2022, Kelly has come home to the department where he earned his doctorate two decades ago. And his first directing project in this new post, which is also part of his ongoing research, is a production of August Wilson’s highly acclaimed play Fences, examining the Black experience in 1950s America. The play will run March 1-10, in the Mitchell Theatre on the UW campus.
Kelly has had a life in the theater that most aspiring artists could only dream of. His career began as a kid in New York City, singing in the children’s choir for the Metropolitan Opera. In his teens, Kelly attended a high school for the performing arts, and although he considered other careers in science and engineering, he followed his heart back to the stage. An accomplished actor with extensive experience in Shakespeare and ancient Greek classical texts, he has performed on Broadway and at regional theaters across the country. A distinguished academic, he has taught acting and theater history around the world — from Finland to Morocco, England to Singapore — with travel facilitated by multiple Fulbright awards. He has also directed for many professional theaters and college programs across the country.
Fences has been produced recently by both American Players Theatre in Spring Green and the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. But Kelly says that “It’s important that Fences is done here in Madison, on this campus. This has not always been a welcoming and inclusive environment. That’s been an issue. And I think it’s time now to tell this story, to have these conversations. And what better way to engage in that dialogue, than with the most accessible, most classic of August Wilson’s plays?”
Set in segregated Pittsburgh, Fences focuses on the life of Troy Maxson, a former Negro League baseball star who struggles to provide for his family as a sanitation worker. A proud, determined, and deeply flawed man whose dreams have been thwarted throughout his life, Troy loves and betrays his family in equal measure. Part of August Wilson’s 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, the award-winning drama explores a Black family’s pursuit of the American Dream against seemingly insurmountable odds.
“August found the divine in average, everyday folks,” says Kelly. “These individuals are struggling to have better lives, just like everyone else.” The play centers around conflicts that can often occur between father and son, between husband and wife, but here they are examined “through a Black lens. So this production is about human interaction. It’s about the limits that these people encounter, while they are trying their best to achieve, and that’s what’s interesting. The play is culturally specific to the Black American experience, but the human quality of a family’s struggles; the love, hate, and the intergenerational squabbles are universal. If the play is done well, this universality will come across.”
Fences is also important to Kelly because of its similarities to canonical texts. “The play was written at an important time, the 1950s. African nations were fighting for independence. Segregation was the norm in the U.S. But the ideas and the language in this play are more similar to the Greeks and Shakespeare. Wilson uses a poetic, heightened vernacular to tell an epic story. The lines have a musicality to them.”
Unlike most university productions, Fences features a mix of professional actors and students. Guest performers Alphaeus Green, Burgess Byrd and Julian White will perform alongside student actors Noah Mustapha Kohn-Dumbaya, Micah Anderson and Naomi Greer. This not only matches the play’s most difficult roles with actors who are age-appropriate, it also allows for a special kind of collaboration between students and working artists.
“It’s wonderful to see the adult actors interacting with the students in the cast,” says Kelly. “I feel like as a group we have bridged those gaps between old and young, experienced and less experienced, and we’ve formed a true ensemble. You can see it when the younger actors sit in the rehearsal hall, listening carefully, watching the scenes they aren’t in. Observing the process this way, they’re learning. I’d say it’s been a great experience all around.”
Although Kelly and several of his cast members have previous experience with the play, he says each time an artist approaches a role they bring new things to the process, and ultimately to the performance. “With age and training, you develop new perspectives that influence the work. You find new things to explore and that creates deeper, more visceral connections to the characters. You’re going to see that onstage with this cast.”
Kelly sees this production as an important continuation of efforts to diversify the stories presented onstage in the UW-Madison Department of Theatre and Drama. Over the past several seasons the department has presented Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs, as well as Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. “I think some people still come to the theater with certain biases. When they see Black characters onstage, they often have negative associations reinforced by the media, that links those individuals with crime and the brutality of law enforcement. In order to overcome those associations, they need new, inspiring stories like these.”
As opening night draws closer, Kelly’s message to the community is, “Come see this one, because it’s time. It’s time to come and be moved. It’s time to start a healing process. Enter into this cultural experience on the UW-Madison campus. It’s time to learn lessons and spur consciousness. This production will do that.”
