Movin’ On Up: Clybourne Park at ACT

Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play Raisin in the Sun looms large in the history of American theatre. As my playwriting teacher Cherrie Moraga described it, for a black female playwright to be produced on Broadway in that climate, she had to write the mother of all “well-made plays.” Indeed, the characters and plot are wrought so skillfully that not even that era’s heavy fog of racism and sexism could cloud the eyes of the Pulitzer committee. Over the past half-century, Raisin continues to be taught in high school classrooms and produced extensively, especially on college campuses.

I admire the boldness of playwright Bruce Norris, whose new play Clybourne Park is in direct conversation with Hansberry’s. At the end of Raisin, the Younger family moves out of their cramped apartment in the south side of Chicago to the fictional white neighborhood of Clybourne Park, willing to take on the potential racism of their new neighbors in pursuit of a better life for their family. Norris’s play takes place in the very house that the Younger family purchases: Act One is set in 1959, as the prior occupants, a husband and wife haunted by the death of their son, pack their final boxes. Act Two is set in 2009 in the now run-down house in the now black neighborhood that has been purchased and scheduled for heavy renovation by a middle-class white couple.

I’ve had the privilege of seeing Clybourne Park twice – once at its New York premiere at Playwright’s Horizons, and last weekend at ACT in San Francisco – giving me ample opportunity to muse on its successes and limitations.

It’s great to see a play that takes on the urgent question of gentrification. We’re asked to consider the politics of who lives where, in proximity to whom, and what facilitates and limits freedom of movement within cities and between communities. Norris’s play acknowledges that the living-room drama is (and in fact has always been) synonymous with the drama of the local community and the larger society. In foregrounding the inter-articulation of family and society, this play attends to the truth that (in this country, at least) conversations about race are always conversations about class, capitalism, and the history of exploiting human beings for profit.

I’m a sucker for plays that use theatrical devices to put history into direct conversation with the present (see Stoppard’s Arcadia, Churchill’s Cloud Nine). They seem to make un-ignorable the truth that “the way things are” is a product of “the way things were,” rather than a natural, unalterable state of affairs. Both the SF and the NYC audiences seemed to “get” the connections the playwright was drawing between “then” and “now”– made clear by their timely laughter and thoughtful harrumphs.

However, despite finding content and form appealing, ultimately Clybourne Park doesn’t satisfy me. Here’s why.

The story of gentrification is the story of privilege. Privilege is getting what you want without too much work. We have terms like “silver spoon” and “silver platter” to help us talk about the materiality of privilege.

Ultimately, much of the drama and almost all of the comedy of Clybourne Park emerges from the difficulty white people have talking about race. The heat and confusion of this difficulty is very sympathetic to audiences at expensive theatres in New York and San Francisco, most of whom are white, middle-class or higher and progressive enough to truly care about issues of class and racial privilege in this country. It’s fine to make plays that speak specifically to this audience (and in fact Norris has said that he is trying to do exactly that). The only problem is that when a play presents issues to an audience from a perspective so similar to their own, they don’t have to work that hard to “get” it. There is no empathetic reach on the part of the viewers to understand what is transpiring onstage in front of them, the kind of reach made by the audience at the premiere of Raisin in the Sun in 1959. It is this reach, and the bravery of a playwright who compels her audience to make such a reach, that results in watershed moments in theatre history.

The other kind of playwriting is the artistic equivalent of the silver platter. The privileged audience sees privileged characters stumbling uncomfortably over their own privilege, and gets to laugh and cry at it from the safety of the velvet chair – thus releasing the pressure valve of that tension in their own lives. Rather than asking the audience to step forward towards the unknown realm of another person's reality, I worry that Clybourne Park holds the platter out too far, requiring too little from the viewers and thus participating in the same structures of inequality that it critiques.