Clybourne Park

Clybourne Park
Written by	Bruce Norris
Characters	5 male 3 female
Date premiered	1 February 2010
Genre	Comedy Drama

Clybourne Park is a 2010 play by Bruce Norris written in response to Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun portraying fictional events set before and after the play and loosely based on real life events. The premiere took place in February 2010 at Playwrights Horizons in New York. The play received its UK premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London directed by Dominic Cooke. The play "applies a modern twist to the issues of race and housing and aspirations for a better life."

Plot

Act I: 1959

Grieving parents Bev and Russ are planning to sell their home in the white middle-class Chicago neighborhood of Clybourne Park. They receive a visit from their local vicar, as well as a neighbor and his deaf, pregnant wife; the neighbor informs them that the family buying the house is black, and pleads with the couple to sell the house to the church instead, for fear that area property values will fall if black residents move in. As arguments ensue about the potential problems of integrating the neighborhood, both couples awkwardly call on Russ and Bev's black housekeeper and her husband to support their opposing views. Russ finally snaps and throws everyone out of the house, saying he no longer cares about his neighbors after their callousness and cruelty to his son Kenneth when he returned home from the Korean War; Kenneth later committed suicide on the upper floor of their home.

Act II: 2009

Set in the same home as Act I, the same actors reappear playing different characters. In the intervening fifty years, Clybourne Park has become an all-black neighborhood now gentrifying. A white couple seeking to buy and renovate the house are being forced to negotiate local housing regulations with a black couple representing a neighborhood organization. (The white couple's lawyer is the daughter of the vicar and his wife, and mentions that they moved out of the neighborhood around the time of her birth; the black wife is a relative of the family who bought the home from Bev and Russ.) The discussion of housing codes soon degenerates into one of racial issues, revealing resentments from both parties.

Real Life Events

Hansberry's parents bought a house in the white neighborhood of Washington Park, an action that resulted in a legal case (Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940)). The Hansberry family home, a red brick three-floor at 6140 S. Rhodes which they bought in 1937, is up for landmark status before the Chicago City Council's Committee on Historical Landmarks Preservation.

Awards and nominations

2011 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play

2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Performance

The premiere took place on February 2010 at Playwrights Horizons in New York featuring Tony Award winner Frank Wood, Emmy nominee Annie Parisse, Jeremy Shamos, Crystal A. Dickinson, Brendan Griffin, Damon Gupton and Christina Kirk.

The UK premiere took place in August 2010 at the Royal Court Theatre in London directed by the artistic director of the theatre Dominic Cooke starring Sophie Thompson, Martin Freeman, Lorna Brown, Sarah Goldberg, Michael Goldsmith, Lucian Msamati, Sam Spruell and Steffan Rhodri.

It then transferred to Wyndham's Theatre in the West End with most of the original cast with the exception of Martin Freeman who was replaced by Stephen Campbell Moore in 2011.