Phylicia Rashad is coming back to the Mark Taper Forum, this time behind the director's table for one of American theater's heaviest hitters: August Wilson's Fences. The production is set to run May 26 through July 3, 2027, and it marks the final chapter in Center Theatre Group's long march through Wilson's entire ten-play Century Cycle.
The news comes as an announcement from Center Theatre Group, which confirmed Rashad will direct a staging of Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play at the downtown Los Angeles venue, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The dates line up with what the outlet describes as the production being mounted at the Center Theatre Group venue from May 26 through July 3, 2027. It's worth noting that as of a March 2026 report from the Los Angeles Times, the company's artistic director had not yet been able to confirm who would direct the drama — meaning Rashad's attachment came together sometime after that season announcement.
With Fences finally on the boards, Center Theatre Group will have staged all ten plays in Wilson's Century Cycle, the sprawling series that chronicles the African American experience across the 20th century, one decade per play. The Times also noted that Fences was slated as the final entry of the cycle to be staged at the company, part of a 2026–27 season built around works — including John Proctor Is the Villain — meant to leave audiences in contemplation.
A Story of Baseball, Broken Dreams and a Backyard Fence
Set in segregated Pittsburgh during the 1950s, the play centers on Troy Maxson, a former Negro League baseball standout who never got his shot in the major leagues and now scrapes by as a sanitation worker. That denied opportunity festers into deep tension at home, straining his relationships with his wife Rose and his son Cory — who has his own dream of playing professional baseball and finds himself measured against his father's bitterness. Fences won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for drama along with Tony and Drama Desk honors for best play.
The story has reached audiences well beyond the stage before. Denzel Washington directed and starred in a 2016 film version opposite Viola Davis, a screen adaptation that introduced Troy and Rose's fraught marriage to a much wider audience.
Rashad's Deep Roots at the Taper
This isn't new territory for Rashad at Center Theatre Group. She has directed Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at the Mark Taper Forum, worked on Immediate Family and Blues for an Alabama Sky, directed A Raisin in the Sun at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, and appeared onstage in Head of Passes at the Taper — a résumé that reflects what the Hollywood Reporter describes as her ongoing relationship with the company as both director and performer.
Her recent credits stretch to Broadway as well: in 2025, Rashad directed Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Purpose, which had already picked up a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award following its run at Steppenwolf before moving to New York, per the same Hollywood Reporter account. Rashad was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2016, cementing a career that spans stage direction and acting alike.
Wilson's Century Cycle has now found its closing bookend at the Taper, arriving with a director whose own history with the playwright's work — and with the venue itself — stretches back years. For Los Angeles theatergoers, next spring's run offers a chance to see one of the cycle's most enduring dramas land on the same stage that has hosted so much of Wilson's canon before it.
