Clybourne Park: A Play

By: Bruce Norris

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Synopsis: A Chicago house becomes a contested site in the politics of race in this “superb, elegantly written, and hilarious” play (The New Yorker).Winner, Pulitzer Prize for DramaWinner, Tony Award for Best PlayClybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood (borrowing a plot line from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun) and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on? Bruce Norris's excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property.“A spiky and damningly insightful new comedy.” —The New York Times“Indisputably, uproariously funny, and a quietly evocative meditation on the by-no-means-obsolete stereotypes that pervade millennial melting-pot America.” —Entertainment Weekly“Courageous. . . . Norris’s elegantly structured play nails marital tensions as much as it does racial disharmony in an evening of ebullient provocation.” —The Guardian