Clybourne Park stingingly smart
Decade-jumping play finds laughs in tense mix of race and real estate
REVIEW Clybourne Park Theatre: Citadel Shoctor Written by: Bruce Norris Directed by: James MacDonald Starring: Doug Mertz, Kerry Sandomirsky, Sereana Malani, Cole Humeny, Michael Blake, Martin Happer, Tracey Power, Evan Hall Running: through Feb. 16 Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com
At a crucial moment in Act II of Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’s lethally funny and disturbing comedy of liberal middle-class hypocrisy, you’ll find yourself laughing —kind of—ataone-upmanship battle of tasteless racist jokes. Caution and tactful demurs are long gone. The gloves are off. Political correctness has been shown up as mere evasiveness.
The R-word, queasiest of all four-letter epithets, has been invoked. But, hey, property and real estate are involved, so all bets are off.
How can we come to this, in an age that pats itself on the back for civilized conversation about race and prejudice? That’s the Clybourne Park question. Even in its structure, Norris’s play, with its two acts set in the same Chicago house in 1959 and 2009, is a merciless assault on our complacency, and the clichés that prop it up, when it comes to this thorniest of subjects. It’s a stingingly smart play. And it gets a stingingly smart production from director James MacDonald at the Citadel.
MacDonald’s vividly acted production captures the compulsive rhythm of escalation from tension, anxiety or irritation to fury that happens inside couples, and in their territorial dealings with the world. It’s horrifying, tense, funny — and familiar — the way that happens. That the same seven actors double as characters from two different eras underlines the point, in a highly entertaining way. Has anything changed?
Norris’s 2011 Pulitzer (and Tony and Olivier) winner is a homage and extension of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play, Raisin In The Sun. The first act takes us to a white Chicago ’hood in the ’50s, where Russ (Doug Mertz) and Bev (Kerry Sandomirsky) have just sold their house of many years.
They have their own reasons, tragic ones, for leaving. But unwittingly, they’ve sold to an African-American family, and that doesn’t sit well with the community association. The pushy president Carl (Martin Happer) shows up with his deaf wife Betsy (Tracey Power) to voice his objections, inextricably bound up with property values. That he airs these right in front of the black maid (Sereana Malani) and her husband (Michael Blake), who get treated with icky condescension by their employers, is cringeworthy in the extreme. And the way Carl tries to implicate them in the discussion ups the awkwardness.
Happer is brilliant, verbally and physically, at calibrating the dance of a strident man of his time trying, in a grudging way, to make browbeating look like calm, it’s-for-your-own-good voice of reason. His very funny performance as Carl is matched by his second turn of the evening, Steve, half the white suburban couple of 2009 who have bought the now rundown house in the downtown black ’hood, ripe for white yuppie invasion.
In the face of objections to gentrification, this time from the middle-class black couple (Malani and Blake) citing heritage preservation, he’s the one who calls the escalating verbal jousting “a euphemistic tap dance.” He’s the one who appals his wife (Power) by getting exasperated and invoking the forbidden R-word. And then the jokes start.
The performances are excellent all around. As the chipper ’50s housewife whose twitchy beaming good cheer hides a world of sad anxiety, Sandomirsky positively trots around the stage in her pumps, squealing with too-bright laughter. She’ll become a brash lawyer in a broadly comic turn in Act II. Mertz as her wounded, and furious, husband, is touchingly convincing. Cole Humeny is very funny as a wellmeaning ’50s pastor, whose conciliatory platitudes increasingly land, like him, on their keister.
The subservience of the black couple is wearing thin as Act I progresses — charted expertly by Malani and Blake. In Act II, these actors emerge as the voice of the racial status quo. Their performances sneak up on you. And Power, amusing as the deaf wife in Act I, becomes the Act II liberal. We breathe a sigh of relief, and then we watch her progressive views get dissolved by self-interest. Oh no, did she really say she once dated a black guy?
In Clybourne Park, the house speaks to us directly, and dramatically, not least because the issue of property values is directly shackled to prejudice. Marissa Kochanski’s detailed design propels us 50 years forward from the ’50s in the course of the evening. Let’s just say this is a play that really needs its intermission. And Leona Brausen’s costumes wittily invoke both eras in American history.
Has progress been made in the racial dialogue? Clybourne Park has its doubts. The human tendency to be savage about property gets in the way. Laugh, and wince.