Set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1957. Troy Maxson was never allowed to play baseball growing up because of his color. Now as a grown man in a changing society, he lets his old anger burn away his son's chances of playing football. The family finds themselves in a timeless battle to move beyond hate and grow together.

"If audiences of all ages and colors have responded passionately to Fences, it is not because Wilson made the slightest concession to universality. Whatever is universal in Fences arises from his fierce commitment to particularity, the particularity of being a black garbageman, the son of a sharecropper, in the Hill section of Pittsburgh in the year 1957. Most audaciously of all, August Wilson has made America see Troy Maxson, in all his precise and explicit blackness, as one of our fathers."—Samuel G. Freedman

"What makes Fences so engrossing, so embracing, so simply powerful, is Wilson’s startling ability to tell a story, reveal feeling, paint emotion."—Clive Barnes, New York Post