If you see enough theater on a regular basis, you eventually develop an intuitive sense which tells you, usually within the first first couple of seconds, whether you're going to be grabbed by the lapels or hogtied for a long, hard slog. Sadly, the latter is much more common than the former, which is why I understand most people's reluctance to take a chance on theater. But a ticket to Clybourne Park, the acerbic new comedy by Bruce Norris, is an eminently shrewd investment, like buying a brownstone in prime Park Slope in 1959, when the play's first act takes place.
1959 is also the year that Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun debuted on Broadway; in that play a black family sows panic by moving into the all-white (fictional) neighborhood of Clybourne Park. In Norris's play, the same scenario is presented from the point of view of the alarmed, white homeowners who fear a decline in property values if a "colored" family gets a foothold. Act Two takes place in the same house fifty years in the future, with the same cast playing contemporary characters locked in battle over the same property. In 2009, Clybourne Park is a working-class, non-white neighborhood, and now the (black) neighbors are the ones up in arms when a white couple moves in and begins renovating the house, which has fallen into squalid disrepair. In comes the koi pond, a massive extension on the house, and a community petition against the gentrifiers' garish designs.
If any of that sounds heavy-handed or didactic, it's not. Norris isn't out to deliver any messages here, except perhaps that America's racial acrimony, while slightly less overt, remains as entrenched as ever. Norris has said he loves nothing more than a good argument, and Clybourne Park delivers, with a refreshing absence of sermonizing shrillness, and an electrifying dose of bold humor. As the uniformly phenomenal ensemble goes to war over a world they can't change and refuse to understand, the comedy inherent in their contradictions blazes like a bonfire, and the audience roars with laughter. This is by far the best new, naturalistic play I've seen this year, and you've got just a few more days to see for yourself; Clybourne Park closes March 21st.
