A House Of Race Cards

Clybourne Park makes you laugh, think, laugh again, cringe. Then it rips a super-glued Band-Aid off of liberal white skin, exposing all the raw, tribal bias white people prefer to think they don’t possess.

If that doesn’t sound like fun, you’re wrong.

This production of the Pulitzer-winning Bruce Norris play, at the Long Wharf through June 2, is fast-paced and acid-sharp. Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein told me long ago, shortly after taking the reins of the theater, that his goal was to produce theater that is ​“not boring.” Well, he succeeded. ​“Clybourne Park” is one of the most enjoyable and provocative evenings of theater I’ve seen in a long time.

But after building to a high-pressure race-based confrontation, Norris lets the air out. It’s 24 hours after the curtain went down, and I’m still trying to figure out whether it was a cop-out or savvy move.

So what is it that has my head spinning?

Norris’ play uses the story of a middle-aged white couple in a fictional Chicago suburb in 1959 to tackle both the cultural transformation that rocked the nation after the Korean War, and the deep wounds of racism and white dominance. The couple has sold their house in a cozy white neighborhood to a black family. A neighbor, ostensibly concerned about the impact on property values, stops by to talk them out of the sale, after failing to buy off the black family on his own.

Sound familiar? It should. The character is Karl Lindner, borrowed from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, who attempted to do much the same thing to the Younger family in the Depression-era-set work.

Norris was inspired by the Lindner character at a young age, he explains in the program notes. ​“I watch it at 12-years-old and I could realize even then that I’m Karl Lindner,” he writes. ​“To see that when you’re a kid and to realize that you’re the villain has an impact. For years, I thought I wanted to play Karl Lindner but then as time went on I thought it’s really an interesting story to think about the conversation that was going on in the white community about the Younger family moving into Clybourne Park.”

“Interesting” is an understatement. The conversation is intricately choreographed, with nuanced reveals. Moments that seem to be throwaways in Act 1 come back in full force voiced by new characters in Act 2. Every phrase seems to be in service to a larger point (or at least a laugh). There’s so much going on one can hardly capture ​“Clybourne Park”’s breadth in a tossed-off review.

The protagonists in Act 1 are prototypical buttoned-up middle-class whites. There’s tension in the room between husband Russ (the terrific Daniel Jenkins) and wife Bev (Alice Ripley). It slowly emerges that son Kenneth came back from Korea accused of some sort of war crime, and hung himself in his bedroom. Russ is bottled up and refuses to talk about it, or much else for that matter. Monosyllables rule.

The dialogue is masterful, a staccato of phrases and easy banter – not a single speech. One of its biggest surprises is that, despite all the jousting over race relations, at its core ​“Clybourne Park” has heart.

Russ may be tortured, but Jenkins (with Eric Ting’s spot-on direction) plays him as a rock-solid everyman, a Reaganesque archetype. When he finally lets loose at Karl, it’s not for Karl’s overt racism, but his busybuddy smarm. Karl’s more loyal to the dollar than to the neighbors themselves, and Russ blames this so-called community for abandoning Kenneth in his time of need. The sale of his house to a black family is Russ’ way of returning the favor.

Act 2 jumps forward 50 years. Whites have fled. Property values collapsed. Crime, gangs and drugs followed.

But the houses are beautiful, the neighborhood is close to downtown, and young, upwardly mobile whites are moving back. We see a young couple, Steve (Alex Moggridge) and Lindsey (Lucy Owen, making good sport of the one cartoon character of the show), as they try to negotiate the size and scale of their tear-down with a black couple, Lena (Melle Powers) and Kevin (Leroy McClain), acting as neighborhood representatives trying to hold off the march of gentrification.

The dialogue scans as if from an NPR meet-and-greet, all polite and deferential and politically correct. After 50 years, relations between the races have come to this: all the right words, but nobody expresses anything real, with the ghosts of past hurt and the geyser of white privilege burbling under the surface ready to explode.

Explode it does, in a furious round-robin of offensive joke-telling, with plaid-shorted Steve (now there’s a telegraph for you) determined not to be offended in order to prove how post-racial he is. Stereotypes are shot around the room like rubber bands in a fourth grade class with a substitute teacher. It’s such a verbal melee it’s a little hard to unpack, but when the front door finally slams in that house in Clybourne Park it comes to this: white people are clueless. They wreak havoc on a community (and its people) and then expect to benefit (and to be thanked) when picking up the pieces. They have no idea that the things they say are stupid and offensive. And I’m not talking about the jokes.

Finally, everyone leaves, and the house is filled with silence. We’re back in 1959, and Ken, in full Korean War military togs, is sitting in the living room, writing a letter we presume to be his suicide note. Mom comes down the stairs.

“You know,” she says. ​“I think things are about to change. I really do. …I really believe things are going to change for the better. I firmly believe that.”
It’s an emotionally interesting moment, but it comes at a time when one longs for the playwright to resolve the questions he’s been challenging us with all evening: are we really so tribal? Can we resolve the assumptions and resentments between whites and blacks in America? What do you mean ​“we,” kimo sabe?

A friend who’d seen Clybourne Park previously told me before the curtain: ​“You can’t leave this play without needing to talk about it.” He was right. I couldn’t stop talking about it.

I asked an African-American acquaintance who saw the show what she thought, and we chatted away.

She told me story after story of well-intentioned but offensive comments from white people. ​“You are so articulate,” they observe. ​“Where are your people from?”

“Are we really so out of it?” I asked.

She thought for a few seconds.

“I hate to generalize,” she finally said. ​“But yes.”

I noticed Natalie Holder-Winfield in the audience on opening night. Holder-Winfield is an employment lawyer who specializes in diversity management, and is the founder and CEO of QUEST Diversity Initiatives.

Since our schedules didn’t line up, I asked her a few questions via email. Here’s what she had to say:

One aspect of the show that struck me right away was its indictment of white liberals as clueless. Are we? 

I didn’t see an indictment of white liberals as clueless as much as I saw the failure to engage in a critical analysis of assumptions — e.g., the priest’s relentless pursuit to get the father to talk about his grief and the mother suggestively asking her maid if she would like to live in Clybourne Park.

When we don’t question ourselves, we can come across as thoughtless. I was actually intrigued by Karl Lindner’s bold and brutal honesty about not wanting a black family to move into the neighborhood. While some may call him clueless or insensitive, he merely predicted (and was not afraid to express) how the white neighbors would react to having a black family as neighbors and how that would lead to the neighborhood’s decline. Karl said what others are afraid to say today.

The show set up some very interesting dynamics about our culture. Act 1, in the 1950s, is depicted as a time when we really didn’t talk about our feelings or deepest thoughts and fears. Russ bottled up his rage about the loss of his son, etc. We cut to Act 2, and everybody has learned the language of ​“tolerance” and respect, but they still don’t express what they really think, until Steve rips off the veneer and brings up race. Are we any better about talking about race now than in the past? 

As a society, we still tiptoe around race. Most organizations and companies will provide diversity training, but I guarantee that you will not find many that will host a similar training about race. Race has a lot of historical baggage and embarrassment that most people do not want to unpack. It’s the bag that sits by our front door that we trip over occasionally.

I felt like the show portrays the white liberal need for displaying ​“tolerance” as emasculating. (Steve is determined not to be offended by a sexist joke aimed at his wife, but when he calls Lena an offensive name her husband Kevin rushes to defend her.) Are there implications about this regarding who we are and how our roles have changed over the years?

I didn’t see the emasculation piece. I saw a hostile debate, with loads of defensiveness, between the white male and black female character. When the white male called her a derogatory name, her husband sought to defend her. When the black husband said, ​“Don’t you talk to my wife that way,” I heard the subtext that white men can no longer get away with offending and abusing black women with their husbands powerlessly standing by. The black husband was saying, ​“Yes my friend, just like this neighborhood, this too has changed.”

I found the conclusion a little anti-climactic. It seemed more about the loss of innocence and the ghosts of what had gone on in the house than any clear sense of what the playwright was trying to say about the state of race relations or our culture. What did you think he was trying to say? Were you left hanging? 

The end was a little reaching and didn’t really add much especially given the fireworks from the previous scene.

Anything else you’d like to add?

The play told the story of Fair Haven, Newhallville, and many other U.S. cities that have felt gentrification’s complexities.