Good Defenses Make Good Neighbors

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: February 22, 2010

It takes a special vision, both clear and cockeyed, to see the present as if it were the past. Half a century separates the two acts of Bruce Norris’s “Clybourne Park,” a spiky and damningly insightful new comedy set in 1959 and 2009. In both parts of this production, which opened Sunday night at Playwrights Horizons, Mr. Norris is examining his subjects through the same merciless telescope, with a historian’s distance and an ethnographer’s detachment.

Compare this play’s two sets of characters, portrayed by one quick-witted ensemble (which includes Frank Wood and Annie Parisse), fumbling through the conversational minefields of the explosive subject of race. You’ll find that the early 21st century comes across just as quaintly mannered and shortsighted as the mid-20th century. When this crafty little satire ends, the world of February 2010 suddenly looks as dated and remote as a sepia-toned street scene.

Mr. Norris’s two-fold period piece, directed by Pam MacKinnon, is set in a fictional building of historic landmark status. Clybourne Park, you see, was the all-white Chicago neighborhood on which a hopeful African-American Southside family set its sights in “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 epochal drama.

The house in Mr. Norris’s play — 406 Clybourne Street, to be exact — is the dream house that Hansberry built, the place her upwardly mobile Younger family was planning to inhabit. In the first act the Youngers haven’t arrived yet. In the second they’re long gone, and Clybourne Park has become a very different, predominantly black neighborhood. And it is now a white family that wants to move into an area that shows every promise of being thoroughly regentrified.

Those of you who, for reasons of sentiment or politics, regard “A Raisin in the Sun” as sacred needn’t be appalled. Mr. Norris is in no way parodying or even deconstructing Hansberry’s play. (George C. Wolfe already did that quite ruthlessly, thank you, in his “Colored Museum.”) Instead he imagines the tangled back stories and real-estate negotiations related to that house on Clybourne Street (why was it being sold so cheaply to the Youngers?) to consider how Americans once talked and continue to talk about race.

Or to be more specific, “Clybourne Park” concerns, to borrow from Raymond Carver, what we talk about when we talk about race. Mr. Norris focuses on the evasions, euphemisms and tongue-tied paralysis that afflict such discussions and comes to the conclusion that talk — at least among the all-American solipsists he portrays — is worse than cheap: it’s valueless.

This is hardly a comforting realization. But as was amply demonstrated by “The Pain and Itch,” his 2006 portrait of a Thanksgiving dinner during which a big turkey and bigger egos were consumed by a family of vultures, Mr. Norris specializes in comedies of discomfort. “Clybourne Park” is breezier and less scabrous than “The Pain and the Itch.”

But Mr. Norris is still sprinkling the theatrical equivalent of itching powder on his characters and on us. And for me the effect is more unsettling and entertaining than that of another, blunter work, now on Broadway, by a better-known playwright on the same subject: David Mamet’s “Race.”

Although “Clybourne Park” has some of the contrivances of an intricate old-fashioned plot — including a document to be hidden in the first act and exhumed in the second — its story is mostly a setup for a series of misbegotten debates. The first half finds a haunted, fretful, middle-aged husband and wife, Russ (a wonderful Mr. Wood) and Bev (Christina Kirk), packing for their imminent move from their longtime residence (designed with classic “Leave It to Beaver” coziness by Daniel Ostling).

Their preparations are disrupted by visitors: Jim (Brendan Griffin), the local minister; Albert (Damon Gupton), the husband of Francine (Crystal A. Dickinson), the family’s maid; and most significantly, Karl Lindner (Jeremy Shamos) and his deaf wife, Betsy (Ms. Parisse), who is pregnant.

Karl Lindner is the same man who appears, briefly and noxiously, in “A Raisin in the Sun,” where he tries to talk the Youngers out of moving into his neighborhood. Having failed with them, he has re-emerged in Mr. Norris’s play to convince Russ and Bev to stop the sale. This leads to a deeply unpleasant exchange of words, including assorted “well-meaning,” poisoned clichés that we are all of course beyond now.

O.K., so we’re not. In the second act another married couple expecting their first child (Ms. Parisse and Mr. Shamos again) have come to the now derelict house to discuss renovations. In addition to two lawyer-broker types (Mr. Griffin and Ms. Kirk), they are joined by Kevin and Lena (Mr. Gupton and Ms. Dickinson), who have lived in the area for years and have some concerns about the newcomers’ plans for their house. This leads to a deeply unpleasant — well, you finish the sentence.

Fortunately “Clybourne Park” has more going for it than the implicit joke in its two-part structure with the inevitable “plus ça change” punch line. As in “Pain,” Mr. Norris has written dialogue that is most notable for the way it is either unheard or misheard by others.

The people in “Clybourne Park” talk, but they don’t listen. And their talk is made up of found phrases and jokes reshaped into a hard-edged personal defense system. The fashions in verbal armor may change as much as they do in clothes. (And Ilona Somogyi’s costumes here are sociologically spot-on.) But words remain what people hide behind, even from those closest to them.

Mr. Norris’s awareness of how lonely this defensiveness leaves people is what saves “Clybourne Park” from heartlessness. It seems poetically right that for reasons you’ll have to discover for yourself, the words “Ulan Bator,” spoken with long vowels by Russ, become the most poignantly loving in the play.

I would quote some of the better lines except that they dry up and die on the page. It’s the blundering rhythms and off-key melodies of the spoken dialogue that make it so memorable and funny, and that most effectively make Mr. Norris’s unhappy but trenchant case for the emptiness of most human communication.

Ms. MacKinnon understands the signal importance of getting those rhythms right, and her cast doesn’t let her down. The performances, especially those of Ms. Kirk, are mannered to the point of caricature. Yet that feels right too. Cartoonishness tends to set in with people who subscribe unthinkingly to the lingos and styles of their times. Everyone wants to fit in, right?

Not that any of Mr. Norris’s characters ever feel, deep down, that they fit in anywhere, which is why they’re so threatened by the thought of neighborhood invaders. “And what’s wrong with comfort?” Bev asks in the first act. “Aren’t we allowed comfort anymore?” Sorry, Bev, but no. Not if you’re in a Bruce Norris play.

BIG MAGIC                                        THE THEATRE

“Clybourne Park.”

by John Lahr

MARCH 8, 2010

There is nothing magical or illusory about the storm that beaches the inhabitants of 406 Clybourne Street, in Bruce Norris’s superb, elegantly written, and hilarious “Clybourne Park” (well directed by Pam MacKinnon, at Playwrights Horizons). The address belongs to the modest bungalow in a white Chicago neighborhood where the Youngers, a striving black family, were headed, in 1959, at the end of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” Norris tells the tale of the subsequent half century. We meet the white couple who sold the house to the Youngers, fluttery Bev and brooding Russ (the outstanding Christina Kirk and Frank Wood), as they are packing to leave; by degrees, we learn of the tragic circumstances that led them to sell at such a knockdown price, allowing a black family to buy into this alabaster community. (Their son, a veteran of the Korean War, hanged himself in his bedroom.) The haunted house becomes a metaphor for American race relations. In 1959, incoming blacks threatened the white neighborhood; in 2009, when the second act takes place, incoming whites, with their architectural plans for expanding the area’s bungalows—which are now monuments to black struggle and advancement—threaten the black neighborhood.

As if he were channelling the great comic playwright George Kelly, Norris uses ordinary incident and palaver to build an extraordinary tableau of the coded bigotry behind which the white characters in the fifties hide their hypocrisy from themselves:

BEV: I mean, in, in, in principle, don’t we all deserve to—shouldn’t we all have the opportunity to, to, to—

KARL (chuckles with amazement, shakes his head): Well, Bev.

JIM: In principle, no question.

KARL: But you can’t live in a principle, can you? Gotta live in a house.

Norris has a gift for social observation, historical analysis, and structure, but his greatest talent is his ability to capture in word and gesture what James Baldwin called “those stammering, terrified dialogues” with “the black man in America.” For instance, Bev attempts to give her sullen black maid, Francine (Crystal A. Dickinson), a silver-plated chafing dish. Karl (the delightful Jeremy Shamos), a Rotarian neighbor who fears falling real-estate prices, paints a picture of unbridgeable racial difference by politely asking Francine if she skis. “This is my point,” Karl says, after Francine says no. “There is just something about the pastime of skiing that doesn’t appeal to the Negro community.”

These fifties characters are as unaware of their racism as they are of the blacks who move almost invisibly among them. In the second act, both the blacks and the whites who gather in the now derelict living room of No. 406 to discuss planning permissions are smugly liberal and all too aware of political correctness. Norris, who is also an actor, turns their dance of civility into a fracas of fulmination. The orchestration of this contentiousness is a kind of master class in comic writing and playing. Caught in the crossfire of hostile racial jokes, the most polite and community-conscious member of the group, Lena (Dickinson), finally loses her cool. “Why is a white woman like a tampon?” she says. “Because they’re both stuck up cunts.” She adds, “I hope you’re not offended.”

Pat Boone’s “It’s Too Soon to Know” plays over the mayhem as the curtain falls; the ballad seems to be the author’s verdict on America’s attempts to bridge the racial divide. But it’s not too soon to know that Norris is a fully hatched talent, and this is a fully hatched play. ♦

`Clybourne Park' Examines Race And Real Estate

NEW YORK — Race and real estate. No shortage of opinions about either one.

Intertwine the two and you get "Clybourne Park," Bruce Norris' remarkably perceptive, often hilarious and surprisingly poignant look at changing – and not-so-changing – views on both subjects in one Chicago neighborhood.

Astute observers of American drama may recall that Clybourne Park is the all-white area of the city where the black family in Lorraine Hansberry's landmark 1959 drama, "A Raisin in the Sun," buys a home.

And in Morris' riff on "Raisin," we are in that house, first in the 1950s, when the white family is preparing to sell and then, 50 years later, when a second white family wants to move into the now black neighborhood.

For this off-Broadway Playwright Horizons production, which opened Sunday, director Pam MacKinnon has assembled a crackerjack ensemble cast. All of them do double duty playing different characters in the two different decades.

And MacKinnon has staged the play with the precision of an orchestra conductor, giving clear voice to a variety of contentious opinions, displayed most vociferously in the play's second half when political correctness evaporates in a parade of one-upmanship bad jokes.

In Act 1, playwright Norris provides a backstory for those original sellers, a couple named Russ and Bev, who are moving to the suburbs. And as the play opens, they banter as if stuck in a '50s television sitcom, the goofy Bev (a deliciously funny performance by Christina Kirk) and the grumpy Russ, a spot-on Frank Wood.

But their comic dialogue masks the heartbreaking reason they are selling the house – to escape the memory of their son, a young soldier, who killed himself upstairs.

The decision to sell doesn't please their neighbors, particularly uptight Karl (Jeremy Shamos), whose racist opinions are hidden in his concern about property values and a loss of community. "Who shall we invite next, the Red Chinese?" he complains.

By the second act, it is the longtime black residents of Clybourne Park (Damon Gupton and Crystal A. Dickinson) who are worried about what 2009 gentrification may do to their neighborhood. Especially when the upwardly mobile newcomers (Shamos again and Annie Parisse) want to put in a koi pond. But then, Whole Foods has already arrived.

Norris, whose last Playwrights Horizons outing was the equally dark comedy "The Pain and the Itch," has a fine ear for sharp dialogue. There is a combative theatricality to the conversations that make "Clybourne Park" such a lively, darkly humorous affair.

But there is an unexpected emotionalism to the proceedings, too, including a sadly sober ending that ties together the different eras.

One final word of praise, this time for designer Daniel Ostling's two distinct settings. The first act features a living room of comfortable middle-class life. After intermission, the worn, ill-used space shows the ravages of time and becomes a potent reminder that nothing stays the same, no matter who is living in the house.

‘Clybourne Park’ surveys how racial attitudes have changed (or not)

MONDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2010 07:42

Bruce Norris' biting new off-Broadway comedy draws blood from bad behavior

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS                NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM                OFF BROADWAY REVIEW

Clybourne Park is the fictitious Chicago neighborhood where the striving Younger family relocates at the conclusion of Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun."

Some readers may recall a scene late in the 1950s drama when a white guy from the Clybourne Park neighborhood association unsuccessfully offers to buy the property back from the Youngers, blandly mouthing the platitude that "Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities."

Inventively riffing off this point, Bruce Norris has composed "Clybourne Park," which opened Sunday in its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons.

Set in the same house at 406 Clybourne Street in 1959 and then in 2009, each sequence populated by completely different characters, the prickly comedy considers racism and gentrification mostly from the perspective of supposedly nice white people who don't give a damn about anybody but themselves.

The 1959 chapter involves the middle-aged white couple who sell their pleasant little house to what will be the first black family in the area. As packing continues, the neighbors increasingly voice their upset and prejudices. Eventually we hear details of a hinted-at tragedy precipitating the couple's departure.

In 2009, a couple of white yuppies have bought the now-shabby house in the predominantly black enclave and plan to demolish it for a McMansion. Representing the community association, a young black couple meets with the newcomers to discuss their concerns regarding historic integrity. After the initially cordial session boils over into a mess of racial dissension, ghosts from the past return for a coda.

While the first act enjoyably builds up to a brawl, it serves mostly as a foundation for the modern-day confrontation. Much as the play ruefully explores cultural misperceptions festering today, it also strikes loud satirical notes regarding the generally bad attitude and manners of our self-involved society. Cell phones ceaselessly ringing, everyone talks over each other (and their lawyers) and nobody bothers to listen.

Another thoughtful play by Norris, whose similarly provocative "The Pain and the Itch" appeared at Playwrights Horizons in 2006, "Clybourne Park" may not persuasively bridge its past and present stories, but it sometimes is bitterly funny, and especially so when commenting upon our me-first lack of honest consideration in matters both great and small.

Director Pam MacKinnon neatly fields a proficient seven-member company, each of whom creates two distinctly different characters. Designer Daniel Ostling's modest arts-and-crafts bungalow interior sadly deteriorates during intermission into what looks like a former crack house, although a pair of stained glass panels poignantly manage to survive the woes of half a century.

from Light and Sound Online America

Theatre in Review: Clybourne Park (Playwrights Horizons)

Christina Kirk, Jeremy Shamos, Annie Parisse, Brendan Griffin, Damon Gupton, and Crystal A. Dickinson. Photo: Joan Marcus

How many times in a season does a play speak so clearly to the moment in which we live? How many times does it happen in the sneaky, offhand, thoroughly original manner used by Bruce Norris in Clybourne Park? If you ask me, the last time it happened, a guy named Tracey Letts was in town.

Clybourne Park begins in 1959; we're in the home of Bev and Ross, in the Chicago suburb of the title. Actually, it won't be their home much longer; they're scheduled to move in two days. As Bev, who works hard at being breezy and funny, packs up their possessions, engaging in word games with Ross, who is engrossed in his National Geographic, subtle tensions begin to arise. They are exacerbated by the arrival of Jim, a minister, who makes a fumbling attempt at counseling Ross regarding an unnamed family tragedy. Trouble really arrives with the appearance of a local Rotarian named Karl Lindner, and if that name rings a bell, you're right -- he's the polite white racist who tries to buy an inner-city black family out of their new suburban home in A Raisin in the Sun.

That Bev and Ross' house is the fought-over (if never seen) domicile of Lorraine Hansberry's classic is only the first of many twists. As everyone, including Francine, the family's black maid, and Albert, her husband, are drawn into an increasingly hostile discussion of segregation, Norris deploys a series of shocks and character revelations with a stunningly steady hand, deftly blending satire, acute social observation, and family secrets into a narrative of mounting tension. He doesn't divide his characters into moral categories; he lets everyone have his say, allowing each his unpleasant aspects. The achievement is so assured that, at the intermission, you find yourself worried that it can't possibly be topped.

And, at the beginning of Act II, those fears seem justified. We're in the same house, 50 years later. Clybourne Park is rebounding from its ghetto days and everybody wants back in. Lindsey and Steve, a young liberal white couple, want a home that's only minutes from downtown -- only thing is, they want to knock the house down, replacing it with an out-of-scale creation by a trendy architect. (Among other things, they're putting in a koi pond.) Opposing them, politely but firmly, are members of the neighborhood committee, led by Kevin and Lena, who are blackand lifelong residents of the area; Lena is a descendant of Hansberry's Raisin family. Conflict flares up only gradually: Norris lets everybody make small talk about all sorts of unrelated topics -- included their favorite European vacation spots -- at such length that you worry he's lost the dramatic thread. But all the chatter masks a deeply buried hostility that is just waiting to pop out and does when Lena quietly raises the issue of race. The talk turns defensive, then hostile -- and, in one of the more attention-getting scenes of the season, descends into a sulfurous exchange of racist and sexist jokes.

There's no question that Norris, a skilled provocateur, has plenty to say about the poisoned racial dialogues of yesterday and today. It's there in Crystal Dickinson's pitch-perfect sketch of a domestic who keeps a smile on her face only as long as it is strictly necessary. It's there in the way Jeremy Shamos, as Karl, patiently tries to explain that his community is open-minded -- after all, didn't they accept the Jewish grocer? And it's certainly there in Lena's description of unnamed economic interests that are threatening her home.

But Clybourne Park also hits another, possibly even rawer, cultural nerve. In its portrayal of, on the one hand, a conformist '50s culture fatally out of touch with any minority concerns, and, on the other, a modern world of squabbling, Balkanized interest groups, he has cast a light on why America may be as ungovernable as so many have begun to fear. The terms of engagement in our culture wars change over time, but the desire for battle never seems to fade.

This bleakly hilarious satire has been guided with an especially sure hand by the director Pam MacKinnon, who has assembled an exceptionally nimble company In addition to Dickinson and Shamos, Damon Gupton eloquently realizes both the overly ingratiating Albert and the supremely self-satisfied Kevin. Christina Kirk is wacky and sad as Bev, and sleek and tough as a real-estate lawyer protecting her clients' interests. Frank Wood invests Russ with an authoritative anger. I especially enjoyed the look of panic in Annie Parisse's eyes as Lindsey tries to stop her husband from telling a joke about blacks and prison rape. Brendan Griffin pulls off a hat trick as the unctuous, back-slapping Jim; a quietly aggrieved member of Lena and Kevin's committee; and the young man who is the source of Bev and Ross' unappeased anguish.

In addition, Daniel Ostling's setting is a vision of middle-class Eisenhower-era-domesticity in Act I (check out the chafing dish, the floral wallpaper, and the "Oriental" lamp), and, in Act II, a convincing urban ruin, the wallpaper slashed and covered with spray paint. In both cases it is lit by Allen Lee Hughes with his usual unfussy skill. Ilona Somogyi's costumes nicely contrast the more formal looks of the past with the contemporary characters' carefully wrought "casual" styles. John Gromada's sound design combines period pop tunes with the offstage sounds of excavation.

That last effect is needed because, in Act II, the yard is being dug up, an activity that yields a trunk containing, among other things, a letter that returns us to the personal tragedy that has haunted the house for five decades. It provides proof, if any is needed, that Clybourne Park is not merely a brittle satirical sketch; there's a real sadness underneath, an awareness that our inability to understand each other can have devastating consequences. It's probably the most accomplished play I've seen all year.--David Barbour

(26 February 2010)