Review: Clybourne Park

© Nathan Johnson

Its Pulitzer Prize not withstanding, Clybourne Park still seems to me a better idea for a play than it actually is. Bruce Norris’ dark comedy, which has now arrived on Broadway after heralded engagements at Playwrights Horizons and numerous other venues, certainly earns points for pungently tackling the still white-hot issue of racism. But this riff on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun substitutes gimmickry for real drama and ultimately feels more sensationalistic than enlightening.

 

The premise is certainly imaginative. The first half is set in 1959, when a white Chicago couple is preparing to sell their home to a black family—the Youngers of Hansberry’s drama, although it’s never explicitly spelled out. The sale has their white neighbors, led by a smarmy community spokesman, up in arms.

 

Act 2 takes place 50 years later, when the dilapidated dwelling in the now gentrifying neighborhood has just been bought by a yuppie couple. The angry interactions among the characters in both acts illustrate the racial divides that are still prevalent, if now somewhat beneath the surface.

 

The first segment features generous doses of mordant humor, mostly supplied by the angry homeowner (Frank Wood) who bristles at the interference of such characters as an unctuous priest (Brendan Griffin). But melodrama comes to the fore with the revelation that the long-married couple is selling their home because their son, who was accused of committing an atrocity during his service in the Korean War, hanged himself in an upstairs bedroom.

 

In the play’s second half the humor takes a darker turn, as the characters, including a black couple, begin trading provocative racial jokes and insults that recall the plays of Neil LaBute in their deliberate shock value. The not so subtle message is that even white liberals harbor unconscious, latent prejudices. The two halves of the play are tied together in a coda that is meant to be hauntingly poetic but doesn’t really mean very much.

 

The playwright has a clear knack for pungent comic dialogue, as previously displayed in such equally edgy works as The Pain and the Itch. But there’s a glib self-satisfaction and neatness to this play that prevents it from being as revelatory as it clearly intends.

 

The evening glides by entertainingly enough thanks to the sharp-as-nails staging by Pam MacKinnon and the virtuosic performances by the ensemble, all playing double roles. Each performer shines in at least one if not both of them, especially Jeremy Shamos as the yuppie who keeps putting his foot in his mouth; Crystal A. Dickinson as a long-suffering black maid and later as the friend who delivers a joke shocking enough to make David Mamet blush; and especially Wood as the father whose sharp anger masks his underlying sorrow.

 

Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun has endured for more than a half-century because it depicted the travails of fully dimensional characters even as delved into the social issues of its time. Clybourne Park, for all its provocations, is unlikely to have an equally long shelf life. 

 

Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200. www.telecharge.com.