Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” has been a classic
American play since it debuted in 1959, frequently revived and adapted to film.
Bruce Norris’s 2009 “Clybourne Park” is a kind of
sequel to “Raisin,” and the only play to win London’s Olivier Award as well as
a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for drama. So it was inevitable that we
would soon see it at Geva, where it was — for me at
least — the most anticipated show of the 2013-14 season.
“Clybourne Park” takes up where “A
Raisin in the Sun” leaves off, kind of, and moves way beyond it. In the first
act, we see a white couple, Russ and Bev (Skip Greer and Roya
Shanks), in the last stages of packing to leave their house on Clybourne Street in Chicago — the house that the Younger
family from “Raisin” will soon occupy, though the current owners don’t know it
yet. Russ and Bev are being helped in their move by black neighbors (Kristin
Adele and Daniel Morgan Shelley), and hindered by an ineffectual minister (Jim Poulos) and by the director of the Clybourne
Park Improvement Association, Karl Lindner (Christian Pedersen).
Lindner has just come from Hansberry’s play, so to speak. He
announces that he has just made a counter-offer to the Youngers to keep them
away from buying the house. He also brings his young, very pregnant wife
(Jessica Kitchens), who happens to be deaf. In addition to showing the various
characters’ reaction to the news, Norris invents a reason for the initial low
down payment for the house (which I will not divulge here).
Act Two takes place 50 years later in the same, much
dilapidated space; the Youngers are long gone. After a period of decay, Clybourne Park is in the process of regentrifying,
and a young white couple (also played by Pedersen and Kitchens) wants to level
the house and build a new one. The roadblock is, once again, the neighborhood
association, this time represented by a successful black couple (Adele and
Shelley), and with a couple of lawyers thrown into the mix (Poulos
and Shanks). Greer plays a construction worker who finds a buried trunk in the
yard dating back to the original owners, which brings “Clybourne
Park” full circle.
The play sounds like it has a neat
ending, but Norris’s clever updating deliberately keeps things inconclusive. He
mainly wants to raise pointed questions about race relations, class relations, our
attitudes toward anyone “different,” and the inability of even the most
intelligent, best-intentioned people to discuss any of the above without
misspeaking, misunderstanding, and arguing.
The characters in “Clybourne Park”
are marvels of inarticulateness and inappropriateness. They repeat themselves
constantly, interrupt each other (and often interrupt themselves), erupt in
frustration, tell shockingly bad jokes about “big black men” and tampons, and nervously
tiptoe around the obvious questions. The “Raisin in the Sun” parallel could
have been a gimmick, but Norris extends that play’s concerns into our time very
clearly and entertainingly. He doesn’t have the answers, but he knows how to
ask the questions with style.
Mark Cuddy directs the Geva cast with great verve and sensitivity to the rhythms
of Norris’s language: those stuttering repetitions really mean something. All
the cast members do a fine job at changing from their 1959 characters to their
2009 equivalents, especially Skip Greer, who plays a grieving, inarticulate
father in the first act and a cheerfully noisy construction worker in the
second. Similarly, Roya Shanks delivers a June
Cleaver-esque mother revealing depths of despair in
the first act, and a snarky lawyer in the second. Pedersen is wonderfully
dislikable in both acts, as Mr. Lindner (the single character held over from
Hansberry’s play) and as a tall order of yuppie scum on white bread in the
second.
The playwright is quoted is the program as saying, “My ideal
audience response is to have them come out of the theatre saying, ‘I don’t know
what’s right anymore. I used to think I knew what was right, but I’m not sure
that I do.'” “Clybourne Park” is an inconclusive
play, but it is an honest one, and it is a funny and powerful work of theater.
It is absolutely worth seeing — and discussing afterward.
This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2014.
Really looking forward to it!