Show and Tell #3!: "Clybourne Park"

Given the imminent production being produced by Cripple Creek Productions in New Orleans this month, I decided to choose Bruce Norris’s uncomfortable hilarious play Clybourne Park.  The play had its world premiere at the Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theatre on February 21, 2010. Despite its relatively short initial run (only about four weeks), Clybourne Park went on to have major productions in London (2010), Rhode Island (2011), and Philadelphia (2012) before finally landing a sixteen-week limited run on Broadway in April of 2012. The show has been immensely successful since its first production and has earned the 2011 Laurence Olivier award for Best New Play, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play. This information was gathered various articles on www.playbill.com and from my own copy of the script which can be found online at sites such as www.amazon.com or in most major bookstores.

Act I of Clybourne Park takes place in 1959 in “a modest three-bedroom bungalow” on Clybourne Street in a predominantly white neighborhood of Chicago. At the top of the show, Russ and Bev, the married couple who owns the house, are packing up boxes and preparing to move after the recent suicide of their son. However, Russ and Bev have decided to sell their house to a middle-class black family. Their neighbors, Karl and Betsy, and a reverend named Jim arrive at the house in an attempt to persuade the couple to sell their home to a white family. These conversations are witnessed by the house’s black maid, Francine, and her husband, Albert. Act II picks up fifty years later in 2009. The house is now run down, in need of repairs, and situated in an all-black neighborhood. The houses new residents, Lena and Kevin, are looking to sell the house to Steve and Lindsey, a white couple looking to renovate the house and reinvigorate the neighborhood by buying houses and beautifying them. The discussions are negotiated by the couples’ respective lawyers. Ultimately, the negotiations lead to verbal conflicts centering on race relations in modern America.

One interesting dramaturgical choice that Bruce Norris makes is that he specifies that the actors in the show double up on roles so that they play one character in Act I and another in Act II (in the original production, one actor was tasked with playing three roles). For example, the actors who play Francine and Albert in act I also play Lena and Kevin in act II. In this particular case, the actors are tasked with playing African-Americans from two very different periods in American history. In act I, Francine and Albert are hesitant to speak out and get involved with the affairs of the white characters until asked for their opinions. In act II, though, Lena and Kevin are much more expressive. While not necessarily confrontational, neither individual is afraid to stand up for themselves and stand their ground against the vaguely racist comments that are made during the negotiations.

Another dramaturgical choice that caught my immediate interest is Norris’s choice to include the character of Kenneth, Russ and Bev’s Korean War veteran son who suffered from PTSD and committed suicide. The character and his actions are brought up and discussed in act I. However, Kenneth only appears at the end of act II after the “modern” characters have stormed out of the house in anger, thereby reversing time from 2009 back to 1959 for the last five minutes of the play. His physical appearance is accompanied by the digging up of his army trunk by Dan, an electrician working on renovating the house. Inside the trunk is Kenneth’s suicide note. In several ways, Kenneth acts to connect the two storylines by showing how history has an impact on the current events of the play. After all, had Kenneth not killed himself, Russ and Bev would not have been compelled to sell the house in the first place.