Iconic Shakespearean actor to make history with August Wilson’s ‘Fences’ in Santa Cruz

Derrick Lee Weeden is known for playing legendary characters.

In his first stint at Santa Cruz Shakespeare in 2023, for example, he played King Lear. And over almost 40 years off and on with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he’s played many more of the Bard’s biggest parts — most famously delivering what some critics consider the definitive modern portrayal of Othello in OSF’s 1999 production.

But that’s a role that was written 400 years ago, and its long and storied history is not lost on Weeden, who has been studying it since he first became an actor four decades ago.

This summer, he’s back at Santa Cruz Shakespeare playing a role that is also likely to last for 400 years — Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s “Fences,” which runs through Aug. 28 at the Audrey Stanley Grove in Santa Cruz. It’s in repertory this summer with “Much Ado About Nothing” (through Aug. 30) and “Macbeth” (through Aug. 30, and featuring Weeden in two roles).

Written in 1983, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning “Fences” is the sixth play in Wilson’s 10-part Century Cycle (aka the Pittsburgh Cycle), each of which examines the Black experience in 20th-century America in a different decade. It’s set in 1957, and Maxon, a former player in baseball’s Negro leagues, is now in his 50s and struggling to support his family after being rejected by Major League Baseball. His bitterness over his broken dreams not only hangs over his own life, but threatens to shatter his family.

With the role of Maxson having existed for only four decades rather than four centuries, it seems like prime time for an iconic actor like Weeden to get in on the ground floor of defining it for the ages. But that’s not how he sees it.

“I remember I was in grad school in the late ’80s when “Fences” and “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” were making it to New York, and the original “Fences” had James Earl Jones and Courtney Vance and Mary Alice,” Weeden tells me in an interview. “August was introducing a whole slew of African American actors that America didn’t know. I mean James Earl and Mary Alice they did, but through this work, we’ve gotten all these other great actors that that were introduced by him.”

Indeed, in the relatively short life of the play, it has already seen Troy Maxson played on stage and screen by acting greats such as Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson and Denzel Washington.

“So when I think about that, I don’t think of myself as one of the foundations (of the role),” says Weeden. “If anything, I think I’m in the, for lack of a better word, stable of actors who have been presenting this work spreading through America.”

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel the pressure of history knocking on the door — but after half a dozen Wilson productions, he’s well aware that this is just how it goes with a body of work that means so much to so many.

“Whenever a group gets together to do August Wilson plays, there’s this other factor that comes in that has to do with the culture, with the Black American descendants of slavery. There’s a responsibility, a really heavy cultural expectation and belief in his work, because along with (Arthur) Miller, possibly Tennessee Williams, he’s probably the playwright of the 20th century,” says Weeden.

But there’s a flip side of that cultural weight that Weeden says is actually uplifting. “There’s this extraordinary thing that’s down under you, that’s carrying you,” he says, “because it ceases to be about you, and it ceases to be about your career or your ambition. It’s really about, ‘Hey, this is our people, and this is the story of our people.’”

Wilson has a unique way of telling that story, and his instantly recognizable style can be a challenge even for an actor of Weeden’s caliber.

“With Wilson, it’s the blues, right? It’s the blues,” he says. “All of his dialogue is like a song. You can just write hits to it. You have to really get that music, and it’s technically demanding because of the flow, the rhythm, the blues. You have to be doing all this stuff, and yet it sounds as if you’re just talking. But nobody talks like that.”

The latter observation is particularly interesting because there’s another writer—the one the festival is named after – about whose dialogue people often say the same thing.

Indeed, both Wilson and Shakespeare made their own music out of the English language. For Weeden, though, there’s an added importance to the fact that Wilson was writing 40 years ago instead of 400.

“There’s a wonderful thing that happens every time I’ve ever done an August Wilson play — there’s a family thing that starts coming in, because of course it’s your father, it’s your grandfather, it’s your great-great-grandparents. It’s all their history, especially for the majority of us who have roots deep in the South. All these stories we can directly draw upon because it’s our family. I mean, we know these people. We know the cadences. We know the blues. We know the music.”

This is the first time Santa Cruz Shakespeare has produced a Wilson play, stretching back 45 years into the company’s former incarnation as Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Weeden predicts it won’t be the last.

“Here’s the thing that’s exciting about Santa Cruz doing this,” he says. “Every theater I’ve ever done at, they inevitably need to just get the first one out of the way, because what happens? They want to do all of them. Audiences love this writer.”

Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s production of “Fences” will be performed through Aug. 28 at the Grove in Upper DeLaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Road, Santa Cruz. Tickets are at santacruzshakespeare.org.