Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, well-directed and staged by Pam MacKinnon, is a very wordy play on an interesting subject – the racial transformation of neighborhoods. It’s performed by an excellent ensemble cast, with great lighting by Allen Lee Hughes on Daniel Ostling’s just-right set. However, the play doesn’t really start until more than twenty minutes into it, when the basic concept is first introduced.
Clybourne Park begins with a white family (babbling wife, sullen, removed husband) who are selling their home in 1959. Nothing but a lot of talk about trivia, mostly blithering drivel. There is a black maid who seems full of resentment. Her husband enters, underlining the obvious class difference, and a quirky man with a deaf wife – oh, and a useless minister. About half an hour in, the action starts when the news that a black family bought the house is revealed.
The white people are squabbling ninnies; the blacks are smart and sensitive. It’s simplistic PC stuff performed as a sitcom with content. Act 2 is fifty years later, and whites are buying the graffiti-covered, deteriorated house from blacks, in the gentrifying neighborhood, played by the same cast in new roles. More small talk and silly drivel. Enter a caricature of a workman chewing gum and trying to talk working class. The graffiti undercuts the PC message — it says that occupancy by blacks destroys. A white woman actually says “Half of my friends are black,” and a stupidly racist joke is told. Low-level sitcom. Nothing new about the world is learned, but a lot of it is quite agreeable in the liberal world of contemporary New York -- so are many prime time TV shows. But for real insight with depth and some kind of shining brilliance that enlightens, you’ll have to go elsewhere.
