CLYBOURNE PARK by Bruce Norris
CLYBOURNE PARK by Bruce Norris
World Premiere: February 21, 2010 at Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theatre
Pam MacKinnon, director
2012 Tony Award for Best Play, 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2011 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play, 2010 London Critics Circle Award for Best New Play, and 2010 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play.
“I saw A Raisin in the Sun as a film in probably 7th grade. Interestingly our Social Studies teacher was showing it to a class of all white students who lived in an independent school district, the boundaries of which had been formed specifically to prevent being our being integrated into the Houston school district and being bussed to other schools with black students. So I don’t know whether our teacher was just obtuse or crafty and subversive but she was showing us a movie that basically in the end -- because Karl doesn’t come in until the second act -- is really pointing a finger at us and saying we are those people. So I watch it at twelve years old and I could realize even then that I’m Karl Linder. To see that when you’re a kid and to realize that you’re the villain has an impact. For years I thought I wanted to play Karl Linder…” (Interview with Rebecca Rugg)
[Norris] wrote, “that we, the all-white students of my school, were the offspring of Karl Lindner. That’s a lesson that sticks with you, the lesson that you are, essentially the villain in someone else’s story. Many years later I thought, what if we turned the story around and told it from the opposite angle, the angle of people like my family, the villains, the ones who wanted to keep them out?” (NY Times)
“I think it is a play for white people. It’s a play about white people. It’s about the white response to race, about being the power elite, about being the people who have power in the race argument, and what that makes us in the present day - the contortions that makes us go through. Because on the Left we really, really like to deny the power that we have. We don’t want to seem like we’re powerful and have the largest army in the world. We want to pretend that we don’t. So, while the play is about white people, it’s even better if there are black people in the audience because it makes white people even more uncomfortable. (Interview with Rebecca Rugg)
When it was recognized with the Pulitzer in April, the jury described it as “a powerful work whose memorable characters speak in witty and perceptive ways to America’s sometimes toxic struggle with race and class consciousness.” (NY Times)
In his boisterous new play Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris conducts a then-and-now tour of the old neighborhood that is as unsettling as it is provocative and finds rabid racism still rages beneath a veneer of bonhomie. (HuffPost )
In both acts, the distaste of the locals is terrifically styled, smouldering behind awkward pauses and unfinished sentences. And unlike lots of drama on racism, it's also very funny: the toe-curling exchange of racist jokes in the second act, in particular, has been bringing the house down. (The Guardian)
"Clybourne Park" is a masterful work for various reasons. Its referents back to the Hansberry play are as inspired as they are logical. [...] Echoes of the past — descendants of the previous generations, victims of race wars from one side or another — are everywhere, despite new language and carefully negotiated intimacies. Double-casting reveals many resonances. And yet at the heart of the play is another American agony that perhaps has nothing to do with the color of anyone's skin. [...] Simply put, it understands and explicates the roots of hate in fear. There is nothing smug or distant or cheap about the authorial voice: It is compassionate and it takes responsibility, even as it is relentless in its peeling of the racial onion, down to its fetid core.(Chicago Tribune)