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Clybourne Park: A Play
By Bruce Norris
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Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood (borrowing a plot line from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun) and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on? Bruce Norris's excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property.
Clybourne Park is the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the winner of the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play.
Book Actions
Start ReadingBook Information
Clybourne Park: A Play
By Bruce Norris
Description
Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood (borrowing a plot line from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun) and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on? Bruce Norris's excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property.
Clybourne Park is the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the winner of the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play.
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Reviews
A play about a black family buying a house in a white neighborhood. The focus is the white family selling the house; this is based on the play A Raisin in the Sun, and the house is the one that they have just purchased. The white family is moving out, and the neighborhood improvement committee is visiting them, unhappy with the sale. The sellers did not know the family was black, but they seem unconcerned, and in fact the wife seems to be the only member of the group that is willing to consider it all right for blacks to live next to whites. The second act occurs 50 years later, when the same house is again being sold, this time to a white family moving into what is now an all-black neighborhood, and tearing down the old house to build a new one. The resistance of the neighborhood to this change is as great as in the first, but it is a bit more difficult to tell what the motivator is - although the white buyers accuse the black couple of racism, it appears it is more the interest of maintaining the historical integrity of the neighborhood - or perhaps its fear of the process of gentrification turning the neighborhood back into an enclave for the upper middle class. A decent read; could be very interesting to see it performed.
Rating: 3A play about a black family buying a house in a white neighborhood. The focus is the white family selling the house; this is based on the play A Raisin in the Sun, and the house is the one that they have just purchased. The white family is moving out, and the neighborhood improvement committee is visiting them, unhappy with the sale. The sellers did not know the family was black, but they seem unconcerned, and in fact the wife seems to be the only member of the group that is willing to consider it all right for blacks to live next to whites. The second act occurs 50 years later, when the same house is again being sold, this time to a white family moving into what is now an all-black neighborhood, and tearing down the old house to build a new one. The resistance of the neighborhood to this change is as great as in the first, but it is a bit more difficult to tell what the motivator is - although the white buyers accuse the black couple of racism, it appears it is more the interest of maintaining the historical integrity of the neighborhood - or perhaps its fear of the process of gentrification turning the neighborhood back into an enclave for the upper middle class. A decent read; could be very interesting to see it performed.
Rating: 3