Clybourne Park | 2022-2023 Productions : The Kalamazoo Civic Theatre

Clybourne Park

clybourne park web image new

February 3 - February 12, 2023


Play

Clybourne Park explodes in two outrageous acts set fifty years apart. Act One takes place in 1959, as nervous community leaders anxiously try to stop the sale of a home to a black family. Act Two is set in the same house in the present day, as the now predominantly African-American neighborhood battles to hold its ground in the face of gentrification.

"Bruce Norris's superb, elegantly written, and hilarious new play, is set at 406 Clybourne Park, the address of the modest bungalow in a white Chicago neighborhood, where the Youngers, a striving black family, were headed, in 1959, at the end of Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun.' We meet the white couple who sold the house to the Youngers, and by degrees, we learn of the tragic circumstances that led them to sell at such a knockdown price. In 2009, when the second act takes place, incoming whites, with their architectural plans for expanding the area's bungalows - which are now monuments to black struggle and advancement - threaten the black neighborhood. Norris, who is also an actor, turns the characters' dance of civility into a fracas of fulmination. the orchestration is a kind of master class in comic writing and playing." -The New Yorker

Contains strong language