A.C.T.’s hilarious Clybourne Park brings a Chicago slum to San Francisco

Clybourne Park, the satirical comedy by Bruce Norris, recently opened at American Conservatory Theater, is a hilarious story of prejudice, racism and real estate. The production uses an ensemble of highly skilled actors to make you laugh at some stark realities. It is bitingly humorous and sharply critical with an engrossingly realistic story that spans decades.

A.C.T. Company core veterans René Augeson and Anthony Fusco begin the show moving out of and selling their middle-class family home in a Chicago suburb. Surrounded by packing boxes, René glories in her ditzy Act I character, then revels in the sarcastic ennui of her different Act II character. Anthony sits in his grumpy chair mostly making unpleasant noises, as well he should considering what happened in the neighborhood, which injustice he later recounts vociferously. The comic satire introduces other characters to illustrate the plight of Bev and Russ (René and Anthony).

Norris’ work is funny and provocative. The keen social insights of this play are chillingly obvious behind the broad overlay of incisive wit. The cast of seven (René Augesen, Manoel Felciano, Anthony Fusco, Gregory Wallace, Omozé Idehenre, Emily Kitchens, and Richard Thieriot) works enthusiastically as an ensemble in less than two hours. When they argue over buying Bev and Russ’ house years later, the actors allow their new characters to be obsessively focused on their own immediate needs to the exclusion of the larger issues of urban decay and bigotry raised by the play.    

Between acts, the ensemble smoothly shifts from an Archie Bunker milieu to a contemporary property acquisition. In this story about race and real estate in America, the Act II characters discuss with barely contained hostility the deterioration of the neighborhood. In Act I, the local pseudo-activists want to keep blacks out of the neighborhood. In Act II, the same sorts of organizers want to keep the gentrifying whites out. A.C.T.’s production directed by CalShakes’ Jonathan Moscone is one of their best offerings lately and has the theatrical versatility to strike you as being piercingly funny or brutally objective, or both, a masterpiece of staging and interpretation.

The West Coast premiere of Clybourne Park by adamant provocateur Bruce Norris plays through February 20 at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco.  tickets (starting at $10) are available online at www.act-sf.org or by calling the A.C.T. Box Office at 415.749.2228.

Also visit www.DoctorTheater.com.
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