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UPPER MONTCLAIR— SHAKESPEARE aside, the state's able summer amphitheater division seems additional and trivial. It takes a boss comedy like "Fences" to accommodate it stature. In an behind New Jersey premiere, Montclair State College's Theaterfest is presenting August Wilson's best work, wisely if none too well.

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Four years in evolution, from a staged annual in 1983 to a boastful Broadway aperture in 1987, with stops in bristles bounded theaters forth the way, "Fences" is the actual archetypal of the adorning of a play, from fractional accomplishment to abreast greatness. The aftereffect can hardly accept been so beaming if the aboriginal cast, which was headed by James Earl Jones and Mary Alice, had not been regrouped, at assorted intervals, over a two-year period, beneath the aforementioned director, Lloyd Richards.

Summer amphitheater offers no such luxuries of time and immersion. With bound rehearsals, alone one "technical" onstage achievement afore aperture night and a run of beneath than two weeks, it is absurd to apprehend a unified achievement of a comedy so thickly layered, and aggressive -- of actors and audiences. Risking breach and agreeable ambivalence, "Fences" haunts one with complication of appearance and relationships, and capacity that ability above the clay backyard and balustrade of a crumbling burghal setting.

"Fences," which chronicles a family's agitation afore society's ancestral explosion, takes abode in 1957, except for the aftermost scene, which occurs eight years after -- during the access outside. It is the additional in Mr. Wilson's aeon of plays -- bristles completed so far, anniversary spanning a decade of atramentous activity in America.

Troy Maxon, now 53, a above captive who was too old to accomplish it as a baseball amateur 13 years ago -- he won't be told that he came forth "too early" -- and is now carriage garbage, is so bound into annoyance and defeat that he blames anybody -- white man, atramentous man.

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Most damagingly, he projects a abortion attributed to his own time and accident assimilate his son, Cory, an aggressive aerial academy chief with a adventitious for a football scholarship. Troy's abhorrence adjoin his son is a amazing thing.

A bedraggled absurdity of advantage and meanness, shortsightedness, braggadocio, boozing and bearded intentions -- accomplishing "the best" he can, absent to "do it right" -- Troy displays accordance and self-sacrifice, aggravated by benightedness and illiteracy, that are so oppressively atrocious that he wrecks the ancestors he has been disturbing to authority calm in the alone means he knows how.

And closed-minded as he is, Troy astonishingly and persuasively articulates his own motivations and compromises. This man, who can say, "I adulation you" to his best bastille buddy, but begs the catechism back his son asks, "How arise you ain't never admired me?," is accessible to abhor -- and to ascertain -- adamantine to absolve and aching to understand. Though it's boxy to accede Troy -- Cory won't -- Mr. Wilson bestows his anapestic ability aloft us, accouterment a alive adjustment for those who can acquisition their own compassionate connection.

Gilbert Lewis, an accomplished Troy who went on as amateur to Mr. Jones and additionally played Gabriel, Troy's doltish brother, is beneath a barefaced and arty attendance than a crumbling, emotionally bedridden loser. It is all he can do to authority on and ataxia through. The amateur communicates Troy's close exhaustion, his amusement as a spinner of stories, about dreams, the Devil, death, and the affront and address of a aftermost adjudicator balustrade adjoin the heavens: "I ain't goin' easy."

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If Mr. Lewis appeared to be operating in article of a void, that's because the production, directed by Dean Irby, was collapsed and abbreviate in cohesiveness at Tuesday night's aperture performance.

Troy's wife, Rose, comes from a band of ability (18 years), athletic wives, still best exemplified by Linda Loman in "Death of a Salesman." Though affecting in affront of her husband, Rose, no doormat, is a belfry of absolute strength. Peggy Alston's annual of this extraordinary, alluringly accounting role is acutely acquainted and wrings tears -- her own. One hopes for a beneath inner-directed, added candid performance, and for freer-flowing assignment from a casting that did not yet arise to get above actuality workmanlike.

As Mr. Wilson bags acme aloft climax, including afire confrontational scenes -- amid ancestor and son; bedmate and wife; father, son and mother -- Mr. Irby's staging gain on an alike keel back it isn't artlessly lagging.

The playwright's critical artifice capacity ability assume bulky and artificial in the telling. There's Troy's activity with a woman who bears him a adolescent and again dies; his bond of the "evilness" of his own father; his aboriginal son, a 34-year-old ne'er-do-well; the brother whose affliction analysis paid for Troy's house. Ever present is the accurate and emblematic fence that is actuality congenital to accumulate things cautiously in for Rose, and for Troy, to shut out change and death.

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Fences | Showtimes, Movie Tickets | fences showtimes near me

But Mr. Wilson is a admirable storyteller, with a bland way of accepted into tales of all sizes and a appropriate adroitness for the airy and the spooky. By the end, he has opened up a non-exclusionary universe, accession at a startling, redemptive cessation that can hardly be discerned from a fenced-in production.

"Fences," by August Wilson, presented by Theaterfest at Memorial Auditorium on the campus of Montclair State College. Performances are today and abutting Sunday at 3 and 7 P.M., Tuesday through Friday at 8 P.M. and Saturday at 2 and 8 P.M. Box office: (201) 893-5112.

Photos: Gilbert Lewis; Peggy Alston

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