In many ways “Clybourne Park” is your average living room drama: the audience is invited into the home of a given couple where guests arrive, drinks are served, banter is shared, and somewhere along the way drama ensues.
The play differs, however, from traditional form in that it allows us to experience this same living room from two very different perspectives, separated in time by roughly 50 years.
When the curtains rise for the first act, we see a solidly middle class home in an all-white neighborhood of 1950s Chicago belonging to “Bev and Russ” (played respectively by Suzanne Bouchard and Peter Crook). The house is somewhat in disarray, with packing boxes strewn all about the floor and empty cabinets lining the walls, because the couple is soon moving to the suburbs where Russ can be closer to his job. Of course, there is another, more troubling reason for the move that we eventually find out as the play progresses.
Enter “Jim” (played by Aaron Blakely), a clergyman who has come to counsel a less-than-welcoming Russ about his negative demeanor and behavior since the death of Bev and Russ’s son, Kenneth, two and a half years prior. Ensconced in his bitterness, Russ will not entertain the clergyman’s good intentions, and frankly tells him to “go fuck himself.”
At this tense moment, “Karl” and “Betsy” (played respectively by Darragh Kennan and Marya Sea Kaminski) enter the scene, eventually making an already volatile situation even more so. Karl is upset because he has learned that the new buyers of Bev and Russ’s house are “colored people… or ‘Negroes’ as they are called these days.”
Karl tries to dissuade Russ from finalizing the sell because he doesn’t want to see property values plummet when the new family moves in. But Russ will have nothing of it, and in a very heated and entertaining exchange between the two men, Russ basically tells Karl to “go fuck himself” too.
Act One ends without very much attention given to the play’s two other characters, “Francine,” the black maid, and her husband, “Albert” (played respectively by Kim Staunton and Teagle F. Bougere).
Act Two begins. The curtains rise on the same living room 50 years later. Although this time, the once nicely furnished and decorated, middle class living room of the 1950s is now littered with graffiti; tiles from the ceiling are missing, the steps leading upstairs are weathered and old, and the once all-white neighborhood has been transformed over the years by a predominately all black one that saw some hard times in the 70s and 80s.
But in a peculiar and not-so-uncommon twist of fate, the whites now want to move back into the area and gentrify it. The neighborhood’s close proximity to downtown Chicago makes it an attractive lure to upwardly mobile, wealthy young couples who desire the urban lifestyle (as long as it includes gourmet, organic grocery stores, chic cafes where they can sip their lattes, fancy boutiques, and other posh amenities). And it is here where we get to the heart of the play’s themes: territoriality.
Without giving too much more away, suffice it to say that the second act offers some very interesting and entertaining conversations on the issues of racism, gentrification, and history. The characters in the first act are long gone and a whole new cast of characters come into play, but played by the same actors and actresses. And it is interesting to see the history and evolution of the house and the neighborhood, which, it should be noted, is the same neighborhood where the Younger family hoped to move into in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic play “A Raisin in the Sun.”
My general reaction to the production is somewhat mixed. The play touches on a lot of issues and offers a very interesting mirror image of the house in different epochs, but it is somewhat hampered by too much exposition and banal dialogue that is neither engaging nor entertaining. I often found myself feeling impatient throughout the show, waiting for the play to progress to something more dramatic. It does get there eventually, but it takes way too long to do so.
The actors’ performances were all believable and strong, and it was nice to see their versatility in playing different characters in the two acts.
However, the star of the show was the house itself. Scenic designer, Scott Bradley, is to be commended for his ability to render two amazingly detailed perspectives of the same house in just one evening. The transformations that took place between Act One and Act Two were nothing short of remarkable. Kudos to Mr. Bradley!
With a running time of roughly 2 hours, “Clybourne Park” is worth seeing. I won’t say it is the most innovative play I’ve ever seen. In fact, in many ways, it is like a hodge-podge of many different well-known plays all in one: a little bit of Edward Albee, Terrence McNally, John Guare, Neil Simon, and of course, Lorraine Hansberry, all rolled into one. But it does touch on timely issues and has its moments that grab you, though they sure take some time to build.
“Clybourne Park”, directed by Braden Abraham, is now playing at Seattle Repertory Theatre April 20 – May 13. www.seattlerep.org. Box office: 206-443-2222.