In September 2024, I sat at Mera Kitchen across from two friends, both musicians, visiting from Philadelphia. As we ate, I gushed about the play I’d just finished reading: “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” by August Wilson. Between bites of rice and plantain, I continued on about how Baltimore’s theater community was taking on the novel feat of performing Wilson’s American “Century Cycle.”
“No city has ever performed them all. We’re the first to embark on this journey through Wilson like this,” I declared.
At other tables, I’d worry that my glee — a true, unabashed happiness — would be taken for granted. It was the fall of 2024. Who cares about August Wilson? (Spoiler: a lot of people.) Luckily, my friends, artists themselves, appreciated performance and the labor of performers. They were as delighted and impressed as I was about the prospect of abundant Wilson productions. A week later, after seeing Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s production of “Joe Turner,” I resolved that I’d take every opportunity to follow the cycle to completion.
Nearly two years later, I’m still excited about Baltimore’s journey through Wilson. Baltimore’s theater community has now made its way through six decades of Wilson’s corpus. “Fences,” the latest show in the cycle, is Wilson’s most famous work, and the production at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company is selling out quickly.
For those unfamiliar, and without giving too much away, “Fences” is a beloved play about Troy Maxson, a Black sanitation worker in 1950s Pittsburgh, struggling to let go of his Negro League baseball dreams and be present with his family. Troy’s decisions as a husband, father, and union leader shape the play, and by the end, we’re left wondering what fences are for: to keep people in or to keep people out. With its commercial success and award-winning acclaim, “Fences” has remained a treasured work in American drama and a launching pad for many Black actors into the spotlight.
The Baltimore August Wilson Celebration, a play festival where nine Baltimore theaters will produce 10 plays (known as August Wilson’s “Century Cycle”), began in April 2024 with Arena Players’ production of “Gem of the Ocean.”
Arena Players’ artistic director Donald Owens, a respected leader in Baltimore’s theatre community, sat front row for “Fences” on opening night. Other notable figures in regional theatre filled out the row, Khalid Y. Long, dramaturg for Baltimore’s August Wilson celebration and president of the August Wilson Society, and Sandra Shannon, founder of the August Wilson Society, among them. Opening night’s crowd, a mix of writers, thespians, and all-around fans of August Wilson’s works, was a tableau of the appeal of the celebration. Audiences are eager to see Wilson’s work on stage.
“For me as a director, and for all of us as artists and audiences, Wilson’s work always feels resonant, and it feels extremely resonant right now,” Reginald L. Douglas, director of the CSC production, says.
“As history is being erased, actively before us, and the question of who is an American feels very poignant and powerful right now. Wilson’s work speaks to those ideas that Black history must be told from a human point of view.”
In this 2026 production, DeJeanette Horne and Lolita Marie, DMV residents from further down the beltway, play Troy and Rose Maxson, the married couple at the core of the play. The two actors, a real-life married couple, found their place onstage in adulthood. Marie joined her first production at 30 years old when a friend suggested she join the cast of a show at Bowie State University. Horne, who has early memories of admiring the Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers, found an introductory acting class at the Little Theatre of Alexandria. Shortly after their journeys to the stage began, the two met as husband and wife characters in The Arlington Players’ production of “Clybourne Park” by Bruce Norris. Life and art bring their relationship as spouses and castmates together again for Baltimore audiences.
Days after the late January snowstorm froze Baltimore, I joined the cast and crew at rehearsal. The ice and frosty temperatures stalled much across the city, but even a blizzard couldn’t delay the countdown to dress rehearsal.
“This cast is a dream to work with. They’re so connected,” Douglas told me a week ahead of opening. The cast, in his view, is rigorous in their study of Wilson and full of kindness. Their chemistry is noticeable from my seat in the audience. Under the direction of Alexis E. Davis, production stage manager, rehearsal runs smoothly, actors and crew attentive to each other and focused on upcoming tech rehearsals. Actors are up, moving fluidly across the stage, running lines and polishing their blocking. Davis, who held the same role for the fall production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” is an assured conductor to the cast’s studied orchestra.
This production is the third Wilson work that Douglas has directed, yet being a part of the Baltimore celebration adds new layers for cast and crew alike. “To be part of such an epic event for the field and the community is a real honor,” he said.
When asked about balancing their onstage and offstage marriages, Marie and Horne are candid. “We parse through it consciously. Knowing this is not us,” Horne says of the onstage marriage rife with conflict and resentment. “We don’t take this home.”
“During those drives here and back, we are dissecting and studying lines. Sometimes we listen to audiobooks. Sometimes just quiet,” Marie adds. “Often, we’ll be in the middle of listening to whatever, and we’ll talk about something that’s happened up here. And we’ll talk through it. The other thing we try not to do is oversaturate the role because we’re around each other all the time.”
“I hope in Troy, people see different facets of a human being. He’s not one note. There’s a symphony of notes,” Horne says.
The two are excited to join Dawn Ursula, Erika Rose, Jefferson A. Russell, and other regional favorites (not to mention Denzel Washington and Viola Davis) in their shared experience of bringing Troy and Rose alive onstage.
“We owe it to ourselves to seek and claim joy and happiness. In each of these characters, you see a striving for just that.”
Lolita Marie
“We owe it to ourselves to seek and claim joy and happiness. In each of these characters, you see a striving for just that,” says Marie.
Other cast members also see the familiarity of “Fences” as a welcome challenge to dive into the world of Wilson’s famous characters and plumb their depths. “You have a child [Cory] who has all the hope in the world, and sometimes that hope comes from not having a finger to the pulse of responsibility,” says Isaiah Evans, who plays Cory Maxson, Troy and Rose’s son.
While audiences may arrive at the theatre beckoned by the familiar marriage of Troy and Rose Maxson, I urge folks not to overlook Shakill Jamal’s breathtaking performance as Gabriel Maxson. Jamal commands the stage, and his sincerity, humor, and sheer talent shine in every scene he enters. By the play’s end, “better get ready for judgment” is a calling card of one of Baltimore’s most gifted rising stars. Gabriel’s tenderness and trials are in the capable hands of an actor I’ll be sure to follow from now on.
With Pittsburgh, Wilson’s hometown, a few hours away, some may question why (and how) Baltimore is the first city to take on the task of completing the “Century Cycle.” What’s our dog in this theatrical fight? And that’s a longer, sweeter story. The short answer: August Wilson is no stranger to Baltimore. Sakina Ansari-Wilson, his daughter, is a proud alumna of Morgan State University. When Ansari-Wilson graduated in 1994, Wilson, that year’s commencement speaker, received an honorary doctorate from the university for distinguished achievement.
Before the opening night performance of “Fences” on February 6, Ansari-Wilson stood center stage and recalled her years at Morgan State. “I’m sure professors are used to getting all kinds of excuses for missing class. I don’t know if they’d heard ‘I’m missing class because my father’s play is opening on Broadway’ much before,” she said.
The road to the celebration, in many ways, runs through Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. Lesley Malin, producing executive director at CSC, developed the idea for the celebration after conversations with colleagues and friends. “The nice thing about this idea is it grew and grew. It started when I had the idea that we [CSC] would do every Wilson play once a year.”
From there, prompted by the CSC Board, Malin rerouted and eyed the possibility of a larger collaboration. What if Baltimore theaters got together and really went big?
Unbeknownst to Malin, the celebration, a growing idea in late 2023, was already on a ticking clock. Arena Players, led by Owens, had “Gem of the Ocean” on their calendar for the spring. The race between the big idea and the stressful, intricate details needed to pull the big idea off was on. If the celebration was to succeed, Malin needed to finalize details, contact the estate for legal permissions, and spread the word before Arena’s opening night… in six months.
As theatres like ArtsCentric and Baltimore Center Stage committed, Malin still hadn’t secured permission from the Wilson estate. Legally, the celebration, until approved by the estate, was a nonstarter. No legal permissions meant no legitimacy and no hope of a festival.
With the help of August Wilson Society founder Shannon, Malin called Constanza Romero, Wilson’s widow and executor of his estate. Months later, without word on the decision, Malin tells me that she remembers coming to terms with the festival’s end. “We’ve got to pull the plug on this” was the overwhelming feeling three weeks out from the “Gem of the Ocean” opening.
Then came Romero: “No, go, go, go!” And everything changed. With three weeks to spare, Baltimore’s collaborative journey to achieve the full “Century Cycle” began.
Personally, I’m jealous of the lucky few who’ve seen every production. I’ve seen four of the six productions — missing “Gem of the Ocean” at Arena Players and “Seven Guitars” at Spotlighters.
ArtsCentric’s production of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” from April 2025 is one that stays with me. Kadejah One’s Ma is demanding and audacious. A true performance of a 1920s blues singer working to retain rights to her voice and music. And beyond “Ma,” Archie Williams’ Toledo moved me to tears. The cast’s harmony and talent were on full display. ArtsCentric and director Kevin S. McAllister truly gifted Baltimore a gem of a show in this moving production.
After “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” I was fully convinced the entire festival should be recorded and sold as a box set once completed so, if nothing else, I can rewatch the stunning performances again and again.
The Baltimore August Wilson Celebration exemplifies that Baltimore is a city spoiled for choice in local live theatre. In the larger context of present-day Baltimore theater, festivals like this are great for local theaters hit hard by recent budget cuts. Decisions to defund the arts, through the rescinding of private and public dollars, hurts local artistic industry, and are particularly hard on long-standing Baltimore playhouses that aren’t favored by the new wave of developmental glitz. The festival is a welcome boon to an industry and its professionals fighting to survive.
The days after seeing “Fences” harken back to my introduction to the play and Wilson’s legacy, in ninth-grade English. My tattered Plume book edition is still in my collection, and my teenage reckoning with Wilson is preserved in pink ink, pencil, and dog-earred corners. Reading Wilson in high school shaped my own dreams for the future as a working-class Black kid.
Before Wilson, the plays I’d read in school were nearly exclusively Shakespearean, and the lessons about betrayal, desperation, and connection were set in ballrooms and palace terraces. I enjoyed Shakespeare’s soliloquies and the trials of his characters, yet the conflicts of self, war, and wealth felt far from my life in a postindustrial mid-Atlantic city. Then came August Wilson.
Looking through my childhood annotations makes me smile, knowing how deeply I still appreciate Wilson’s wit and wisdom. The worn pages are evidence of my early study and the burgeoning idea that I, like Wilson, could create stories where working-class characters were more than the moral counterweight to a rich family’s life. He gave me hope that poor Black people were more than lessons for others to learn from. And that’s what he does for so many artists and readers. Wilson is a bard of Black storytelling. His works explore the lives of sanitation workers, housewives, day laborers, and musicians. And these explorations aren’t flimsy gimmicks. They’re epics. Wilson is attentive, and his characters are meaty, frustrating families, friends, and coworkers without making a mockery of poverty or labor. In Wilson’s works, we aren’t a punchline or moral device — we’re the whole of the story.
In the dramaturgical notes, before the play’s dialogue begins, Wilson writes, “They sold the use of their muscles and their bodies. They cleaned houses and washed clothes, they shined shoes, and in quiet desperation and vengeful pride, they stole, and lived in pursuit of their own dream.” These lines distinguish the experiences of African Americans in Pittsburgh, largely Southern migrants from the Carolinas and the Deep South, from their European immigrant neighbors. That story, of migration and surviving in a new city by doing the job no one else wants to do for too-low wages, is a Pittsburgh story, and it’s a Baltimore story. It’s a story of extraction, exploitation, and families dreaming anyway.
Where Shakespeare considers the haunted halls of kings and princes, Wilson turns over the rubble of America’s industrial revolution, focusing on how African American families fared during the rise and fall of agriculture and steel.
Seeing the cycle, 10 plays covering a century of African American life, steadies me in my understanding of Wilson’s work. Seen individually, it’s easy to miss recurring themes Wilson writes into every play. The benefit of the festival is watching how, with each decade, Wilson clarifies his point about labor and the cost of survival in the United States. Where Shakespeare considers the haunted halls of kings and princes, Wilson turns over the rubble of America’s industrial revolution, focusing on how African American families fared during the rise and fall of agriculture and steel.
In “Fences,” Wilson’s vision of industry, labor, and racism in the 1950s is sharp. His surgical incisions of the American Dream slits the phantasm, the haunting ghost, between the ribs, and in examining its innards, he shows us that its nourishment depends on all it can devour. And I agree with Wilson that its appetite is particularly ravenous for Blackness and poverty. After seeing CSC’s production of “Fences,” it’s apparent to me that the American Dream gorges on the sweat of laborers, people chasing hope and love. The Dream is a ghoulish, insatiable figment.
Whether you agree with me on The Dream’s appetite or not, The Baltimore August Wilson Celebration is a glorious opportunity to watch Wilson’s precision as a storyteller and playwright with working-class roots travel through time. Each decade proves that the American Dream, in all its wolfish hunger, survives, even if we do not.
Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s production of “Fences” has been extended. Audiences can see the performance through March 8.