There Goes The Neighborhood

Fifty years after white flight, a white couple has returned to build a home in a newly gentrifying neighborhood — and lands in a tense scene with neighbors. ​“It’s race,” the husband blurts out. ​“Isn’t it?”

That scene takes place onstage in Long Wharf Theatre’s current production of Clybourne Park, a play that confronts the audience with uncomfortable questions about race and urban neighborhoods. (Click here to read my review of it.) The point seems to be that after all these years we still don’t have a mechanism for honestly addressing racial issues in the United States.

That scene could have just as easily taken place here in New Haven.

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. I thought her perspective on the play would be revealing.

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.