 Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park is now on stage as the opening play in Ensemble Theatre’s debut year in its residency at Notre Dame College. The play highlights racial, sexual and gender attitudes. It won both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play. Clybourne Park is a follow-up to Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, which looks at a house in a fictional Chicago urban area, before and after the Younger family moved in to it. Hansberry’s play, titled after Cleveland poet Langston Hughes’ “Dream Deferred,” was the first script by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. It starred Sidney Poitier, Cleveland native Ruby Dee, Louis Gassett, and Claudia McNeil as Lena “Mama” Younger, the woman of the family, who decides to invest the payment from her dead husband’s insurance into the purchase of a house in Chicago’s all-white Clybourne Park neighborhood in order to allow the family to have a better life. The play won the 1969 Tony Award for best play. Raisin in the Sun was based, in part, on Hansberry v. Lee (1940), a real court case that centered on a class action suit by Lorraine’s father and the NAACP against Chicago’s restrictive covenants against Blacks living in certain areas of the city. Hansberry wrote of the situation and the lawsuit: “That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house. ... My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger (pistol), doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court." Norris, who is white, portrays fictional events, based on his imagination of what happened when, after the Clybourne Park neighborhood became almost all black due to white flight, and then later became an “in-place” for young white “liberal” families to buy and restore, or wreck and replace properties in the now gentrified area, complete with a Whole Foods. Clybourne Park introduces Bev and Russ, who are in the process of packing to move out of their recently sold home in Chicago’s Clybourne Park neighborhood in September, 1959. The house is filled with negative memories. Kenneth, their son, a depressed Korean War vet, who was accused of slaughtering civilians, hung himself in the home’s attic. The neighbors, rather than befriending the couple, shuns them. In Raisin in the Sun, when the neighborhood association finds out that the house at 406 Clybourne Street has been sold to “negroes,” in order to “save the community’s property values” because of extrapolated Black in-flight, the association sends Karl Lindner to attempt to bribe the Youngers to not move into “their” neighborhood. The pay-off is rejected. In Clybourne Park, about an hour after Lindner went to the Younger family’s apartment, he comes to the Clybourne Street house to plead with Bev and Russ to consider the neighbors and the property values and cancel the sale. Conversations reveal that Bev and Russ turned over the sale to a realty company, so they did not know anything about who bought the house. They refuse to revoke the sale to the Youngers. Arguments, the history of Bev and Russ’s conflicts with the neighbors and their need to move, ensue. Their black housekeeper and her husband, who has come to take her home from work, become involved, when a trunk containing Kenneth’s mementos, which was buried in the backyard, are unearthed. This lays the foundation for the riveting second act. The setting for the second act of the play is exactly fifty years later in the same 406 Clybourne Street house as the first act. Now it is dilapidated. Present are an African American couple, the wife, who we find out is the great niece of Lena “Mama” Younger, a young white couple who are planning to demolish the house and building a grand new house on the property, and several lawyers. There is underlying tension. The planned replacement house doesn’t fit the building code requirements, and there are problems over the wording of the deed, but, most importantly, there are unspoken issues. After much running around in verbal circles, racial, gender and sexual orientation issues emerge, full blast. Offensive jokes, accusations, and insults abound. What hasn’t been said, is now vividly addressed. During the mayhem, a workman, who is preparing the ground for the excavation for the new house’s foundation, enters. He brings in the buried trunk, which is eventually opened. The contents lead to the emotional climax of the play. The play’s humor and pathos are nicely refined. The cast (Brian Pedaci, Mary Werntz, Jailyn Sherell Harris, Christian Achkar, Nnamdi Okpala, Dan Zalevsky and Hannah Storch), except for some projection issues by several performers, are on target. They generally don’t act; they realistically are the person they are representing. In the past, Ensemble has been noted, and received awards for their use of electronic media to create proper illusions. It is too bad that they didn’t use their skills to better represent the house as it transforms from a nice facility in act one to a run-down hovel seen in act two. We needed to see the ripped wallpaper, boarded up windows and wooden floor streaked with water stains, not a map of the area. That visual effect would have helped complement and complete this strong production. CAPSULE JUDGMENT: Clybourne Park is a unique evening of theater. The Pulitzer Prize play is well written and relevant. The production is basically well-conceived by director Celeste Consentino. This is a go see production! Clybourne Park runs through October 9. For tickets call 216-321-2930 or go to https://www.ensembletheatrecle.org/ Special note: After many years in the former Coventry Elementary School in Cleveland Heights, has emerged from the pandemic as the resident theatre partner of Notre Dame College, located in the Performer Arts Center of the campus located at 4545 College Road in South Euclid. There is free parking in a lighted lot, adjacent to the theatre entrance. | ||
