Theatre in Review: Clybourne Park (Longacre Theatre)

Oscar Hammerstein said you've got to be carefully taught to hate and fear, but in the 21st century we know better, or think we do. Words can be weapons, we tell ourselves -- and it's a sin to use racial and sexual epithets. Publicly, we're engaged in verbal disarmament; we train ourselves not to demean others, carefully policing our sentences, purging them of anything that smacks of prejudice. Corporations enroll their employees in sensitivity training. Universities guide their students in the niceties of male-female and communications. After all, it's the civil thing to do, isn't it?

But what if, loaded with goodwill and invincible in our ignorance, we wield words like daggers anyway, unconsciously baring our prejudice and condescension? Welcome to Clybourne Park, a Chicago neighborhood where, over the years, everything changes except the level of social discourse. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Bruce Norris has taken an x-ray to the American conversation, at mid-20th century and today, finding precisely calibrated layers of tribalism, ignorance, and self-righteous rage. The result is a comedy of bad manners that is both shockingly funny and terribly sad. Liberals and conservatives alike, beware: This isn't the kind of play that rewards you for having the "right" attitudes; thanks to the author's take-no-prisoners approach, nobody emerges from the theatre unscathed.

Clybourne Park begins in 1959, as Bev and Ross, a middle-aged couple, are moving out of their longtime home. Despite some bright banter, there's trouble in the air; we soon realize that the move is a desperate attempt at jump-starting Ross out of a debilitating depression brought on by a family tragedy. Not helping matters is the appearance of Karl Linder, a neighbor and local Rotarian, who drops the bombshell that Ross has sold the house to a black family.

Yes, Karl is the same character who, in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, tries to buy the house back from its new owners. (You don't need to know this to enjoy Clybourne Park, but it adds an extra kick.) As everyone, including Francine, Bev's black maid, and Albert, her husband, are drawn into an increasingly hostile discussion of segregation, Norris deploys a series of shocks and character revelations, deftly blending satire, acute social observation, and family secrets into a narrative of mounting tension.

In Act II, it's 50 years later, Clybourne Park is rebounding from its ghetto days and everybody wants back in. Lindsey and Steve, a young liberal white couple, have bought the house, which is now in a state of near ruin, and they've roiled the neighbors with their plans to install a koi pond and add 15' to the building's height. Opposing them, politely but firmly, are members of the neighborhood committee, led by Kevin and Lena, who are black and lifelong residents of the area. (Lena is a descendant of Hansberry's Raisin family.) The negotiation flames into open warfare when Lena quietly raises the issue of race, and the conversation descends into an exchange of racist and sexist jokes that leaves the audience gasping with laughter and shock.

There's no question that Norris, a skilled provocateur, has plenty to say about the poisoned racial dialogues of yesterday and today. It's there in Crystal Dickinson's pitch-perfect sketch of a domestic who keeps a smile on her face only when her employers are looking. (Watch how, when asked a question, she pauses ever so slightly, studying her interlocutor for clues to the expected answer.) It's there in the way Jeremy Shamos, as Karl, announces with boneheaded sincerity that "there's something about the pastime of skiing that does not appeal to the Negro community," and notes that a black family wouldn't find a local store that stocked their "preferred foods." It's also present in Lena's description of unnamed "economic interests" that are threatening her home, and in Lindsey's impulsive announcement that "half of my friends are black."

Norris keeps scrambling our expectations, making it impossible for us to make easy judgments. Karl may be a bigot -- "You know as well as I do that this is a progressive community," he says before attempting to keep the black family out -- but he's also a devoted husband, mourning the loss of a child by miscarriage. The way everyone treats his wife, Betsy, who is deaf, like a child with learning disabilities allows the author to make a larger point about the marginalization of all minorities in the Eisenhower era. ("See -- she understands!" cries Bev after struggling to communicate with Betsy.) Not that Norris spares Betsy, either; after one of Ross' tirades, Karl snaps, "That is not language I will tolerate in front of my wife!" -- a remark that leaves a stageful of characters thoroughly nonplussed.

If the first act portrays a conformist '50s culture fatally out of touch with any minority concerns, the second act offers us a modern world of squabbling, Balkanized interest groups. (Before the meeting ends in total disarray, the gay and womens' delegations will be heard from, too.) Norris uses his then-and-now structure to conclude, in bitterly funny fashion, that a half-century of social change has pretty much left us running in place.

This razor-sharp satire has been guided with an especially sure hand by the director, Pam MacKinnon, who has assembled an exceptionally nimble company -- everyone is double-cast -- to navigate the overlapping conversations and hairpin turns of mood. (One of the great pleasures in watching Clybourne Park is tracking ideas and tropes from Act I that recur in Act II, always in a very different context.) In addition to the fine work of Dickinson and Shamos, Damon Gupton eloquently realizes both the overly ingratiating Albert and the supremely self-satisfied Kevin. Christina Kirk is wacky and sad as Bev, who is desperate to save her seething husband from himself, and later, is sleek and tough as a real estate agent protecting her clients' interests. Frank Wood, who so often plays weaklings and milquetoasts, invests Russ with an authoritative anger. I especially enjoyed the look of panic in Annie Parisse's eyes as Lindsey tries to stop her husband from telling a joke about blacks and prison rape. Brendan Griffin pulls off a hat trick as Jim, an unctuous, back-slapping minister who does nothing to calm the waters in Act I; a quietly aggrieved arbitrator in Act II; and Bev and Ross' son, the source of their unappeased anguish.

In addition, Daniel Ostling's setting is a vision of middle-class Eisenhower-era domesticity in Act I (check out the chafing dish and the floral wallpaper, among other details), and, in Act II, a convincing urban ruin, the wallpaper slashed and covered with graffiti. In both cases the stage is lit by Allen Lee Hughes with his usual unfussy skill. Ilona Somogyi's costumes contrast the more formal fashions of the past with the contemporary characters' carefully wrought casual styles. John Gromada's sound design combines period pop tunes (Perry Como singing "Catch a Falling Star") with the offstage sounds of excavation.

That last effect is needed because, in Act II, the yard is being dug up, an activity that yields a trunk containing, among other things, a letter that returns us to the personal tragedy that has haunted the house for five decades. It provides proof, if any is needed, that Clybourne Park is not merely a brittle satirical sketch; there's a real sadness underneath, an awareness that our inability to understand each other can have devastating consequences. When it opened in 2010, it struck me as the best American play since August: Osage County. I see no reason to revise that opinion. -- David Barbour