Bruce Norris’ characters talk a lot in “Clybourne Park,” at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, where the chatter and snappy dialogue is nonstop. But none of those characters communicate. Husbands don’t communicate with wives and vice versa. Blacks don’t communicate with whites and vice versa.
“Clybourne Park” is set in September 1959. It cleverly weaves itself back into Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” the play that dealt with a black family moving into a white suburb of Chicago called Clybourne Park. One of the characters in that play, Karl, is a white representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association. He appears in this play, too (played by Cody Nickell), visiting the owners of the house that has already been sold to ask them to reconsider selling. The purchasers are black, Karl explains, and he is concerned about the effect that will have on the neighborhood.
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Norris thus smoothly sets up a situation that is obliged to deal with integration. All the characters are drawn into the discussion: the seller of the house, Russ (Mitchell Hebert), his fluttery wife, Bev (Jennifer Mendenhall), their black maid, Francine (the extraordinary Dawn Ursula), her husband, Albert (Jefferson A. Russell), a minister (Michael Glenn), and Karl’s wife (Kimberly Gilbert).
These characters have very different views on the meaning and virtue of integration and Norris has a good ear, not just for hearing how clumsy people are when put in situations that make them uncomfortable, but also for unveiling the cause of that discomfort: being faced with something unknown.
Act II takes place in September 2009 in the same house Norris created for Act I. The same cast members play very different roles and the situation has totally changed. The bungalow now is in disrepair, Clybourne Park is a predominantly black area, and a white couple (Nickell and Gilbert) wants to renovate and move in. They meet with various people, among them two representatives of the community (Russell and Ursula) who are concerned about the proposed changes.
Norris doesn’t just use the new situation to comment on how times change. His people in Act II are more defensive, at times more concerned with political correctness than they were in 1959, but the scene works its way into a hilarious demonstration of hostility, offensiveness and bad taste.
Director Howard Shalwitz works with a skilled cast here, capable of bringing out all of Norris’ barbed humor. Particularly outstanding are Hebert, as the grieving father in Act I, and Russell and Ursula, as the community representatives in Act II.
Norris clearly intends the play to be about racial tension in America in the 20th and 21st centuries. His scathing treatment of bigotry, hypocrisy and smugness is inspired. “Clybourne Park” works well on that level. It also reaches beyond the issue of race, to become a telling tragicomedy about how rare it is for a human being to stop his or her internal monologue and really hear how someone else thinks.
