BWW Exclusive Blog: CLYBOURNE PARK Behind the Scenes: Day Four

BroadwayWorld.com welcomes Clybourne Park to the Broadway neighborhood by offering readers an exclusive behind-the-scenes peek as the play gets ready for performances. Through this unprecedented access to the fascinating creative process of technical rehearsals, students from Fordham University will keep BroadwayWorld.com readers in the loop through daily updates and photography. Log on to follow along as this Pulitzer Prize-winning play moves into its new Broadway home and literally gets built from the ground up.

I walk into the Walter Kerr and the first thing I see is the wreckage. The house on stage looks like hell, graffiti on the walls, doors off their hinges, and the mirror on the door in the bathroom is smashed. Today, tech rehearsal starts early on in Act Two, as the characters try to hash out the socio-political ramifications of the middle-class white couple trying to demolish this formerly beautiful house in a predominately black neighborhood in order to build a larger, more garish model for the family they're trying to start.

Despite the relatively low technical difficulty (from an outsider's point of view) of this section in the play, the atmosphere at the Kerr is highly focused. The actors have been working on this play for over two years now and easily chat and joke with one another when the crew is in a hold. Even the director, Pam MacKinnon joins in with the gang, but at the same time is always fixing something, without ever getting overbearing, without even speaking of the tone of polite conversation. This goes double for the actors, who are never not looking for something they can improve. Annie Parisse debates the effectiveness of sitting on the lip of a cement bucket as opposed to moving center. Jeremy Shamos tries to set in stone the exact moment he crosses into the hallway in order to make another actor's entrance more aesthetically natural (or maybe just easier for that actor). The special effects in Clybourne Park are the hyperrealism of their set and props (walking in and seeing coconut waters and iced coffees, I thought that a set builder or a lighting technician just had to put their things down for a minute) and the subtleties the actors and their fearless leader (MacKinnon) find in defining their characters relationships through space and Bruce Norris' razor-sharp, terrifically uncomfortable dialogue.

That's not to say that there are no technical miracles in this play. Indeed, after watching a long dialogue-heavy sequence with (seemingly) no cues called, the scene seamlessly transitions into the 1960's as a character from the present day setting of Act Two discovers a letter from the house's former residents. Two eras exist onstage at the same moment and neither reality is bleeding into the other, even though the two scenes are practically on top of one another. It's a hard moment to capture, and a beautiful one. Did the cast and crew know the moment would look so beautiful when they got to work today? Probably. After all, they've been doing this for about two years now. Still the moment gives off the impression of being something new and organic, something no one has ever seen before, and after all, that's the ideal for a piece of theater. This team still manages to make it look like something they've been doing for so long now is fresh and brand new. In other words, they've got it made.

Jake Ahlquist, Fordham University Class of 2012, pursuing a B.A. in Theatre with a concentration in Performance. 

Photo Credit: Ben Cohen/Givenik.com 

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