Fences Analysis

Analysis of the play Fences staged at Actor's Theatre of Louisville. I saw the previous Thursday's performance. I received a 93 on this paper.

For the most part I thought the performance I attended went really smoothly, with all of the actors “on”. The largely geriatric audience seemed to pick up and keep up with action well, particularly well following the switch from humor to serious emotion at the start of the second act. There were some appropriate gasps as some of the emotional revelations (Troy’s cheating, Alberta’s death). The audience at the performance I went to seemed to have a particular support for Rose who received some loud cheers.

I found it intriguing that the amount of cheering drastically increased in the second act. From what I gathered from the murmur and trickle of audience conversation at intermission and at the end of the play, it appeared that much of that night’s audience was more captured by the emotion of the second half than the light-hearted entertainment of the first.

I heard some in class from previous performances discussing how their audiences didn’t follow the switch as swiftly and treated even some of the serious moments as if they were supposed to be completely comedic.

My largest complaints with the performance were related to the set design. The thrust-like design of the Pamela Brown Theater has some very harsh angles to it that really dominated the set design. These angles, where they came across in the fence and porch designs helped to add a “shoddy” feel to them, but also made them harsher to look at.

I thought that the fence and porch designs were ...