Show and Tell Post 3--Clybourne Park

Clybourne Park was written by Bruce Norris.  It premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on February 21, 2010, where it was directed by Pam MacKinnon.  It premiered on the West End at the Royal Court Theatre in August 2010 (with Martin Freeman as Karl and Steve).  Finally, it premiered on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on April 19, 2012.  The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best Play, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, and the Theatre World Award, and it was nominated for many others.  You can find the play here, or you can wait until September, when Swine Palace will be staging the play.

Clybourne Park is an unofficial sequel to the 1959 Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun, which was about the black Younger family attempting to move into the all-white neighborhood Clybourne Park.  The first act of Clybourne Park takes place during the events of A Raisin in the Sun, but from the perspective of the white family who is selling their house.  The characters are Russ and Bev, who are attempting to sell their house while grieving over the death of their son, Francine and Albert, Russ and Bev’s black housekeeper and her black husband, Jim, the clergyman, and Karl and Betsy, the neighbor and his deaf wife.   In the second act, all of the actors change characters, as the events of the play take place in the same house in 2009.  Over those fifty years, Clybourne Park has become an all-black neighborhood, the black characters represent a neighborhood organization, and the white couple is seeking to buy the house.  After lengthy discussions of housing codes, the conversation eventually turns to racism, to which both parties respond poorly.  At the very end of the play, a nearby worker finds an old trunk with some of Russ and Bev’s stuff, including their son’s suicide note.  We are transported back to 1959, and Bev catches her son, Kenneth, late at night. One of the very last lines of the play is “I really believe things are about to change for the better. I firmly believe that.”

An interesting dramaturgical choice to me is Bruce Norris’ insistence on staging very irrelevant dialogue.  In the first act, this decision manifests itself as many, many pages of dialogue about the correct and incorrect capitals of various foreign countries.  In the second act, the majority of the early dialogue is about indecipherable housing code regulations.  The version of this play that I read was 210 pages long, so that’s a really, really long time to spend on irrelevant stuff in a supposedly important play.  If I had to guess what precisely it means, I would think that it shows a connection from 1959 to 2009 that is consistent throughout the play, and the connection is ignorance.  In 1959, the owners of the house cannot name the capitals of foreign countries, showing their international ignorance.  In 2009, they don’t know the housing code regulations of their own neighborhood, perhaps showing domestic ignorance.

The structure of this play is one that utterly confounds me.  Since the story is told in 1959 and in 2009, the only consistent character in the entire play is the house.  It’s very hard to find a consistent plotline to follow here—essentially, Clybourne Park is two very, very similar plays that occur fifty years apart.  The choice of structure is probably the most interesting dramaturgical choice to me, as it goes against all history of a dramatic journey.  To set the second scene in 2009 with entirely new characters is a bold choice compared to setting it after the Younger deal went through in 1959; in that case, we would be able to see a really clear story with consistent characters.  However, as the play is, the overarching plot is that of the house and the neighborhood.  This play is more like Three Viewings than anything else.