IF YOU CAN’T STAND RACE JOKES
Hilary Prendini Toffoli talks to Bruce Norris, creator of ‘Clybourne Park’, the brutally funny Pulitzer-winning play coming to SA this week
Then you might have a problem with Pulitzer-winning playwright Bruce Norris
BRUCE Norris has lived in what he calls “a protective bubble of whiteness” all his life. He grew up in deeply conservative Houston in Texas — attending the same church as the presidential Bush clan — in a family not unlike the one which, in the first half of Clybourne Park, inadvertently reveals its racist attitudes towards the black family buying its house.
“Much of what I heard in my home took the form of unintentionally derogatory references to black people, Mexicans, Jews, et cetera, usually masquerading as genteel, polite conversation between the white adults I knew,” says the 56-yearold playwright. Many of Karl Lindner’s lines (the character played in the South African production by Andrew Buckland) are direct quotations from Norris’s father, whom his son describes as an educated man “often blithely unaware of the appalling racism lurking in some of his opinions. And I have no doubt that, as I get older, I will appear equally appalling and oblivious . . .”
Racism is not limited to the play’s whites. The second half is set 50 years later, and this time the house’s black inhabitants don’t want a white family buying into what’s become a black neighbourhood that’s slowly gentrifying. Racial mayhem ensues.
The cathartic underpinning of this toxic portrayal of race relations is Norris’s dextrous humour. It ranges from whiplash wit to rude one-liners, as the multiracial cast of characters compete to tell the most racist jokes they can think of. A white man’s black joke — “What’s long and hard on a black man?” — is countered by a black woman’s white joke: “Why is a white woman like a tampon?” I leave you to google the punchlines.
Since its Broadway debut five years ago Clybourne Park has won Pulitzer, Olivier and Tony awards and been staged in so many countries Norris has lost track. They include an unauthorised bootleg production in Nairobi — “with names, places and ethnicities changed, against my objections” — and a German production that cast a white actor in a black role but was stopped by Norris, who called for a boycott of productions which continued the “asinine tradition” of putting white actors in blackface.
“I was labelled a racist because I was denying white actors the opportunity to play black roles,” he says. He also declined a New Zealand production with actors of Pacific Island heritage playing the black characters. “If you can’t reproduce the intended story, why bother? If you produced “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys, say, with an all-white cast, would it still be the same play?”
As it happens, playing the lead in Master Harold is what launched Norris as an actor three decades ago after he graduated with a degree in theatre. Though he went on to have a significant career in theatre and movies, he says acting makes him “self-conscious and embarrassed” — he’s so thinskinned he can’t watch standup because he’s too afraid the comic will fail — and so in 1991 he wrote the first of his nine plays, all entertainingly provocative dramas based on hard-core topics. Now living in New York with his girlfriend of 10 years, a teacher and theatre director, he doesn’t experience himself as successful. “Every time I attempt to write a new play I feel as though it’s the first time and I have no idea what I’m doing or how to proceed.”
His plays have established him as a ruthless social satirist — and an unruly dinner guest. “I take a perverse pleasure in creating discomfort in a room,” is how he describes it. “I get a twitchy, paranoid feeling whenever there’s consensus.” He puts this down to “a genetic disposition to illtemper and an irritation/ exhaustion with what seems to be the bottomless bullshit of our culture . . . I come from a family of ferocious arguers, with rage issues. So being funny, I suppose, is a way of defeating rage.”
Nor does he believe his brand of satire offends the people it’s aimed at. “It’s pretty hard to offend a nice liberal audience. They tend to be masochistic and even when you’re openly insulting them they generally conclude you must be talking about someone else.” LS
‘Clybourne Park’ opens at Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre on August 16. For info and tickets, www.thefugard.com
‘I take a perverse pleasure in creating discomfort’