Not as simple as black and white
Clybourne Park writer Bruce Norris wants spectators to think
Playwright Bruce Norris was a 12year-old Texan when he first encountered A Raisin in the Sun, the play that would inspire his own Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Clybourne Park, nearly 40 years later.
Studio 180, the Toronto company in the forefront of staging politically stimulating theatre ( Stuff Happens, Our Class, The Laramie Project), got the rights to the script last year just before it won the Pulitzer. It opens Thursday at the Berkeley Street Theatre.
Norris, now 51, was on the phone from New York, where the Broadway production of Clybourne Park is preparing for an April 19 premiere, recalling the events that started the journey long ago.
“Basically, it was one of the first plays I was ever exposed to and it was in a social studies class. The teacher showed it to us to illustrate the negative effects of segregation, which was a pretty subversive act, I later realized, because I was going to a school that had been deliberately zoned to be virtually segregated. In Houston, in the 1970s, after the Civil Rights movement was supposed to have succeeded.”
Norris is frank about his youthful reaction to Lorraine Hansberry’s historic script.
“To be honest, the evil white guy in the play was the only person I could identify with. I thought his arguments about not letting a black family into a white neighbourhood made perfect sense.
“But as the years went by, I came to realize the status of A Raisin in
“We liberals today are so brittle and thin-skinned that we take any investigation of our motives personally and that’s not healthy for anyone.”
BRUCE NORRIS
the Sun in the history of American playwriting and my own relationship with it began to change.”
Hansberry’s play, which opened on Broadway in 1959, told of the Younger family, who decide to take the insurance money left to them from their father’s death and purchase a house in an all-white community.
Despite negative pressure from forces both black and white, they go ahead with the move.
It was the first script presented on Broadway written by a black woman and directed by a black director (Lloyd Richards). It also made a star out of Sidney Poitier.
But over the years, there was backlash against the play’s message, even in the black community, with George Wolfe satirizing it viciously in his play The Colored Museum. Then a 2004 Broadway revival, starring Sean Combs, Phylicia Rashad and Audra Mcdonald, turned the tide and proved a giant hit. Shortly after that, Norris found himself thinking about the play again. “I read it once more and realized that the ostensibly bad white character in Act I doesn’t say anything that is not true. He’s simply saying these are the things that are going to happen and they do. “You can’t help deny that it’s a seminal play, nowadays, in its own way; it’s also a small-c conservative play and that’s what got me thinking.” Norris came up with a diabolically clever set of matched one-act plays. In the first one, he shows us the events of A Raisin in the Sun through the eyes of the whites in the community and, in the second, he brings us forward 50 years. The neighbourhood is now all black and gentrified. A white couple is trying to move in and faces their own set of problems, not unlike those faced by the blacks a halfcentury before. Some writers with no seeming capacity for irony have wondered at Norris’s motives “and have labelled me a Republican playwright,” laughs the man who styles himself “a radical leftist, economically at least. When I write a play, I want people to think about issues, not to come into the theatre to have their own beliefs ratified. “We liberals today are so brittle and thin-skinned that we take any investigation of our motives personally and that’s not healthy for anyone. I take what I’m writing very seriously, but that doesn’t mean I get self-important. Laughter is a big part of my strategy. Conflict is funny as long as you’re not in it and get to watch.”
Norris is confident that the play will “find its own resonance in Toronto just as it did in London, when Brixton was exploding right next door. It’s a universal situation.”
And when asked what statement he finally hopes to make with Clybourne Park, he’s got his answer ready.
“I think before you make a statement about how pure your racial motives are, it would be good to stop and listen to the other side and then think about it.”