Clybourne Park Off Broadway
Opening Night: February 21, 2010
Closing: March 21, 2010
Theater: Playwrights Horizons
Who are the people in your neighborhood? In 1959, a white family moves out. In 2009, a white family moves in. In the intervening years, change overtakes a neighborhood, along with attitudes, inhabitants, and property values. Loosely inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Bruce Norris’ pitch-black comedy takes on the specter of gentrification in our communities, leaving no stone unturned in the process.
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February 22, 2010
It takes a special vision, both clear and cockeyed, to see the present as if it were the past. Half a century separates the two acts of Bruce Norris’s “Clybourne Park,” a spiky and damningly insightful new comedy set in 1959 and 2009. In both parts of this production, which opened Sunday night at Playwrights Horizons, Mr. Norris is examining his subjects through the same merciless telescope, with a historian’s distance and an ethnographer’s detachment.
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February 21, 2010
In "Clybourne Park," Bruce Norris speaks to that thing people always say about a house with a lot of history: "If these walls could only talk." When the play opens in Chicago in 1959, the modest home in a nice neighborhood that a white couple has just sold to a black family (think "A Raisin in the Sun") is already burdened with one dark secret. That secret will resurface in 2009, when a white couple prepares to move into the now-run-down house in what has become a black neighborhood. But while the walls do talk, they don’t speak with any real strength of conviction.
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February 22, 2010
With his often-scathing new satire, Clybourne Park, now getting a thrillingly crackerjack production at Playwrights Horizons, Bruce Norris once again proves he’s no mere provocateur. No doubt, there will be plenty of post-show discussion about the themes of racism and social change that Norris explores in the play — while simultaneously splitting open your sides — but savvy theatergoers will also be talking about the playwright’s gifts for ingenuity and craftsmanship.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 26, 2010
Anyone remotely offended by foul language, off-color jokes, and racial stereotypes should steer clear of Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park, now receiving its world premiere at Off Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons. But those thin-skinned theatergoers would be missing an absolute corker — a completely audacious, architecturally ingenious entertainment.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 21, 2010
It is one of the most moving scenes in American theater, that moment in “A Raisin in the Sun” when Walter Younger, originally played by Sidney Poitier, tells Karl Lindner of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association that he and his (black) family are moving into their (white) neighborhood, that they can’t be bought off. Lorraine Hansberry’s play ends shortly afterwards on a hopeful and inspiring note.
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