Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park is a beautifully constructed and entertaining examination of racial prejudice, social inequity, and changing political pieties in America. The MTC’s production has frailties, but is still well worth seeing: the stronger performances are stunning, the weaker will settle as the season progresses. Regrettably, I don’t have time to expand the review right now. 320 words to review a play like this is … most unfortunate.
Clybourne Park, By Bruce Norris, directed by Peter Evans, MTC Sumner Theatre, Until October 26.
Alison Whyte, Greg Stone, Bert Labonte and Zahra Newman
Initially, I struggled to see why Clybourne Park won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. It’s worth persevering. Bruce Norris’ examination of race and real estate in Chicago offers much food for thought. There are some high-fibre ideas underneath the melting ice-cream of the repartee.
A contemporary theatrical response to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In The Sun (1958) – the first play by an African American woman to hit Broadway – it’s set in the same house, before and well after that play’s action.
The split-level comedy drama opens with constipated humour. Some of the performances are so strained it’s like watching a bad stage resurrection of the parents in Leave It To Beaver (after Beaver and Wally have offed themselves in despair).
A mourning couple (Alison Whyte and Greg Stone) is leaving a white-bread, picket-fence suburb. They’ve sold the house to the first coloured family to move there. White neighbourhood leaders intrude on their grief to protest – an ugly farce.
Dreadfully approximate American accents and brittle, overbright stereotypes obscure period authenticity. Challenging, though, to make late-50s politics and mannerisms come alive. There’s much to unimagine.
Performances and play improve vastly after interval. After decades of ‘white flight’, the community became poorer, blacker, socially troubled. It’s now gentrifying. A young white couple (Patrick Brammall and Laura Gordon) wants to demolish the house and rebuild. They’re mired in a planning dispute with African American neighbours. Tensions fray; political correctness flies out the window as instinctive biases leap to their throats.
Zahra Newman. What a star. Her two characters – a cheerful, self-censoring maid and an articulate, passive-aggressive middle-class African American – are beautifully observed, setting up subtle resonances and preserving a lucid genealogy of the effects of prejudice. Bert Labonte is only slightly less accomplished, and a fine comic actor indeed.
Freed from period constraints, the script and acting take flight. The comedy is funnier, true to life. Patrick Brammall’s anxious WASP takes such commanding flow of the conversation that his insistence on reverse racism seems at once plausible and ridiculous. Peter Evans’ initially lame direction finds its legs, and the show leaves you with a thoroughly entertaining portrayal of what hasn’t changed in US culture. These characters spend so much time arguing about houses, they’ve forgotten what makes a home.