The words house and home and used interchangeably but they are not synonymous. A community houses homes but it isn't always a place where one feels welcome. The hook of Clybourne Park, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that Woolly Mammoth is staging again after a hit run last year, is that it is a take-off on A Raisin in the Sun, Loraine Hansberry's play about a black family who wants to take the insurance money they receive after the patriarch's death and move to a better neighborhood. Their new white neighbors do not welcome their arrival. And before the Youngers become united in their purpose, they have to deal with their inter-family strife.
Clybourne Park has two acts--in the first sent in 1959, a white couple (the Stollers) is confronted by neighbors who have learned that the couple's house has been sold to a black family; in the second white gentrifiers who want to buy the same house in 2009, post white flight, are confronted by black neighbors how object to the white couple's renovation plans, and to what the couple represents.
I saw the play on the stage, via the seats behind the set. This was a very interesting arrangement and I don't feel like I missed out because I wasn't in the seats out front.
Just as the set of Clybourne Park is transformed between the two acts, so are the characters. The same actors (with only one additional performer) are in both acts. The parts don't correspond exactly but there is a symmetry to it. And some key phrases from the first act are repeated in the second with a different intent the second time around.
The very real tension of the first act where latent hostility and the schisms between characters are handled in a polite, but very acrimonious 1950s fashion melts into a puddle of offensive jokes, verbal violence and recriminations in 2009. In the 1950s, it is the F word that shocks; 50 years later jokes laced with racism, sexism and homophobia jokes cause the audience to laugh in shock and clutch at imaginary pearls.
The playwright, who is also an actor, says that as a kid he was obsessed with A Raisin in the Sun. In an interview printed in the play program Norris says "…I never got to play Karl Linder so I thought, I'll just give him some more to do." We all want to see ourselves reflected in creative works, and this play is very well constructed, but I agree with The Washington City Paper's Abdul Ali: Clybourne Park doesn't do right by it's inspiration, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry drew on her family's experience of being the first black family in a white Chicago neighborhood; Norris has said “my primary exposure to anyone African-American up until I was 14 was our maid. There’s no way to escape the fact that I’m a racist.”
In Hansberry's play, Lindner visits the Youngers to tell them that the neighborhood association will buy the house from them at a higher price to keep them from moving into their neighborhood and in Clybourne Park, he does the same but you also meet his deaf wife and see how annoying he can be. Norris also says, "I liked anything with violence around it, particularly is it was violence around ideas." He told New York magazine that audiences "want to align themselves with someone in a play...and one of the most fun things to do is deny them that option.” And he does this because no one is left unscathed.
Well, maybe one person is left unscathed…not by life, but by Norris. The first time the house is sold, over the protests of the neighbors, it goes for a reduced price to a black woman who was not informed of the tragedy that took place in the house. She likely could not have afforded it if it has not been sold at a reduced price because of the tragedy. The second time it is sold, to white gentrifiers whose taste and motives the neighbors question, the newest owners were also unaware of the tragedy. The person behind the tragedy does not really speak, except through an unfinished letter. Since he has little to say, he is the one person who the audience is lead to feel for because the rest, whether it be because of simple human foibles or because they have acted unpleasantly, lose audience sympathy. The play shows that all of us can tap into some ugly emotions and poses the idea the community that is is difficult to form a community among people, whether they seem the same on the surface or not.
For its part, Woolly Mammoth has held forums after each performance to garner discussion among members of the community. Experts or special guests are invited to help generate dialogue about the play, speaking from the vantage point of the community organizations they represent. The talk-back sessions I attended for Oedipus el Rey and Eclipsed were very good and I have to say that the one for this play left me a little disappointed because the special guest seemed more intent on proving a point than on getting a discussion going.
The play itself, however, is enough to generate plenty of discussion. If you can get over the Woolly Mammoth to see it before it ends on August 14, you should.
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company- 641 D Street, NW, Washington, DC 20004
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