Clybourne Park: Real Estate and Racism at the Center for the Arts in Boston

Photo: Craig Bailey. From left to right, Thomas Derrah, DeLance Minefee, and Michael Kaye.

 

Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer prizewinning Clybourne Park, a SpeakEasy production now playing at Boston’s Center for the Arts, uses Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic, A Raisin in the Sun, as a springboard to discuss race relations in the United States. A White man, living in an era when many believe we are moving towards a “post-racial” or color-blind America, Norris’s perspective diverges widely and wildly from Hansberry’s. A Raisin in the Sun was deeply personal to Hansberry. Its story of a Black family, whose purchase of a house in a segregated middle-class neighborhood aroused the White community’s hostility, was based on her parents’ experience. The oppressive racism of the period permeated her life. A Raisin in the Sun treats a working-class African American family’s efforts to achieve the American dream in the mid-twentieth-century.

Norris’s play is divided into two acts, separated by fifty years, with two sets of characters, played by one set of actors, seven in all. Both acts take place in the same house, the center of the drama, almost a character in itself. It is the very one bought by the Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun. The drama of Act One concerns the couple who sold the house to the Youngers and the reaction of their neighbors.

Like its predecessor, Clybourne Park is realistic in style, with elements of the well-made play. The attractively furnished living room speaks of 1950s comfort. At first glance, the characters dress and speak as representatives of their class and milieu. As the act progresses, the satirical side of Norris’s writing manifests itself. A Raisin in the Sun, written at the height of American realism, while comic at times, does not comment on itself. The gravity of the Youngers’ difficulties is presented straightforwardly.

Act One of Clybourne Park turns on secrets, which are slowly revealed. It opens with a middle-aged couple about to move, the living room filled with boxes. The husband Russ (Thomas Derrah) sprawled in an arm chair, dressed in his pajama top and work pants is reading National Geographic, and eating his way through a gallon of ice cream. His wife Bev (Paula Plum) is halfheartedly packing and talking to her African-American housekeeper Francine (Marvelyn McFarlane). The seemingly friendly relationship is fraught with class differences leaving Francine always on guard. Bev and Russ get into a half joking desultory conversation about the derivation of the word Neapolitan. Despite the appearance of normality, there is underlying tension.

The tension and confusion mounts with the arrival of Jim (Tim Spears), a minister, neighbor, and fellow Rotarian. Jim, an awkward do-gooder, talks to Russ in a pseudo-therapeutic manner, thereby incurring his anger. Russ has recently withdrawn from his former acquaintances and dropped out of the Rotary Club. The reason is the death of his son.

Perhaps most startling – at least for those acquainted with A Raisin in the Sun – is the appearance of Karl Lindner (Michael Kaye), the character who tried to buy out the Younger family to prevent their taking occupancy of the house in Clybourne Park. He arrives with Betsy (Philana Mia), his deaf, pregnant, and amenable wife. Her deafness, the source of vaudeville humor, is a precursor to the ways that playwright Bruce Norris imbues racism with comedy.

Karl announces that the house has been bought by a “colored family,” a fact apparently unknown by Bev and Russ. His purpose is to prevent the Youngers from moving in. Reason, persuasion, and blackmail are the tools he uses to convince Russ to renege on the agreement. Karl explains that the family’s presence would destroy the “community,” which already has a Jewish-owned grocery store, evidently barely tolerated. In league with Karl, the minister drags a reluctant Francine into the argument, asking her if she skis. When she says no, Jim feels he has scored a point about cultural difference. Bev ineffectually stands up for the new owners, spouting platitudes about tolerance.

Infuriated by Russ’s recalcitrance and driven by his fear of falling real estate values, Karl threatens to tell the prospective owners that Russ and Bev’s son committed suicide in the house. Russ explodes and, in a powerful scene, releases the pain and anger he has suppressed under the guise of apathy. His son fought in the Korean War, committed atrocities under orders, came home a broken human being, and was rejected by the “community.”

The act ends with Bev and Russ, alone in the house, able to talk honestly and move into the future.

Act Two in 2009 finds a new assemblage of characters sitting in the now poorly furnished, dilapidated living room. Stylish, educated, and upper middle class, their behavior and conversation typify their demographic. Each actor’s role shares a trait with or is related in some way to the character he or she played in Act One.

The group is involved in a meeting, the purpose of which is unclear at first. (Norris appears to enjoy baffling the audience.) Once again, the conflict revolves around control of the house. As Karl predicted, Clybourne Park mutated into a rundown Black neighborhood. But, because of its proximity to downtown, it is being gentrified. As a sign of the times, Whole Foods has replaced the local grocery.

Lindsey (Philana Mia) and her husband Steve (Michael Kaye) have bought the property and plan to do an extensive renovation for which they need a zoning variance. Kaye’s Steve is as crude as his Karl. But the power is in the hands of a self-assured young Black couple, Lena (Marvelyn McFarlane) and Kevin (Delance Minefee), who appeared in the first act as the maid and her working class husband. In their new iteration, they are well travelled and ski in Switzerland.

Lena, in particular, resents the changes – Whites moving in – taking place in what she calls “a historically Black neighborhood,” although this upwardly mobile couple is enjoying the benefits of gentrification, which, by necessity, will drive out poor Blacks. That she is the namesake of her great aunt Lena Younger, the purchaser of the house in 1959, partially explains her attachment to history. Territoriality has changed color, but remains invidious.

What begins as a polite business meeting to discuss zoning regulations devolves into racist and sexist name calling in the form of vicious jokes. While Act One is highly plotted, the talky second act involves the stripping away of “civilized” behavior in a fashion reminiscent of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage.

Norris pulls the play together with a creaky plot device – a trunk containing the son’s belongings and suicide note. In Act One, Russ buries the trunk in his yard. In Act Two, Dan (Thomas Derrah) finds the trunk, while digging up the back yard, and brings it into the house so that the new owners can open it. No one pays attention to him, most likely because as a manual laborer, he is not a part of their world, and, therefore, beneath their notice. Although racism is the principal topic of the play, Norris touches on a broad spectrum of prejudices, mining them for humor.

The epilogue takes place in both time periods. As Dan is trying to open the trunk stage center, we return to the house in 1959, where Bev finds her son writing on the window seat, stage left. She goes up to bed and the son disappears. Dan finds the letter in the suitcase, begins to read it aloud and morphs into Russ reading it for the first time.

I found the play entertaining and interesting, although somewhat superficial and slick. The purposely flawed characters, written for shock value, prevented me from identifying with any of them. According to an interview with Bruce Norris, the play was created for White audiences with the goal of making them “uncomfortable.” The sudden gasps during the performance I attended suggested he succeeded, at least with some of them.

SpeakEasy’s production is well directed, designed, and acted. The ensemble is very strong with each actor fully present and alive at all times. Thomas Derrah, excellent in both roles, endows the pained and angered Russ with complexity. As Francine, Marvelyn McFarlane successfully hides her discomfort with White people under a layer of politeness; as Lena, she is appropriately manipulative and bitchy.

Clybourne Park continues at the Boston Center for the Arts until March 30.

Playwright …………… Bruce Norris

Director ………………. M. Bevin O’Gara

Scene Designer ……… Christina Todesco

Costume Designer……. Mary Lauve

Lighting Designer …… Deb Sullivan

Cast

Bev/Kathy ………… Paula Plum

Russ/Dan ………… Thomas Derrah

Francine/Lena …….. Marvelyn McFarlane

Jim/Tom ………….. Tim Spears

Karl/Steve ………… Michael Kaye

Betsy/Lindsey …….. Philana Mia

Albert/Kevin ………. DeLance Minefee