Ultimately, there is a sweet message here about being true to yourself while also allowing yourself to explore new aspects of your identity. The darkest material has to do with Charlie and Braden's parents: Her mom was depressed and killed herself, and Charlie - who can't remember - has bloody nightmares and Braden's dad has a drinking problem and gave him a black eye while drunk. Later, she and Braden kiss, too, (and she tells him he's a better kisser). Charlie goes out on dates with a boy and kisses him in her family's hot tub. Parents need to know that On the Fence is a fairly tame teen romance. It offers us a kaleidoscopic perspective on Wilson’s imposing cycle of imaginative confrontations with the dramatic possibilities of twentieth-century African American history and metahistory, seen here as refracted through the rhythms of the visual arts, blues, and jazz through the political and psychic territory bounding and binding American cultures through the lessons of gender, the poetry of vernacular rhetoric, and the ongoing dialect of sensibility between classical and counterclassical performance traditions.”-John S.Braden's dad has a drinking problem, drives drunk, and gets abusive after he's been drinking.ĭid you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide. In the variety of their responses to the works, united only in the seriousness they bring to the project and the respect each of these contributors has for the author’s art, Professor Nadel has given us a work that makes an exciting and long-lasting contribution to American and African American theatre history and criticism.”-Nellie McKay “Alan Nadel’s carefully orchestrated collection of essays on the riveting world of August Wilson’s drama stakes a formidable claim to be the most sophisticated and widest-ranging critical exploration to date of the work of any single African American playwright. Although August Wilson is already widely written about and highly acclaimed by critics and theatregoers alike, this first collection of scholarly essays devoted to the present corpus of his ongoing work makes an unparalleled statement of his significance to the field. Pease “This is a splendid and welcome new volume in theatre criticism. “The splendid essays Alan Nadel has gathered for this volume bring into focus the central problem-conflicted representations of African American historical and cultural experiences-of the most important playwright in the United States.”-Donald E.

Covering the full range of Wilson's oeuvre, the collection's superb essays and comprehensive introduction make this book indispensable for teachers and students of both modern drama and African American studies.'-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

'Alan Nadel's collection of essays about the work of August Wilson is the definitive critical source on this great playwright's life and works.

The fences book