BWW Reviews: CLYBOURNE PARK Takes on Political Correctness at Open Stage

In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry gifted the world her classic play A RAISIN IN THE SUN, dealing with the trials and tribulations of the Younger family, including their determination to move from their African-American neighborhood in Chicago to a middle-class white neighborhood, Clybourne Park. In 2010 Chicago actor/playwright Bruce Norris, born a year after A RAISIN IN THE SUN, gifted us with CLYBOURNE PARK. The Tony and Olivier-award winning play, sometimes dubbed a "response" to A RAISIN IN THE SUN, addresses the flip side of the coin - the white neighborhood's response to the impending integration - and a new issue, that of regentrification of declining neighborhoods.

And yet, at the root of this story is something else entirely. Just as A RAISIN IN THE SUN was about a family and not a house, CLYBOURNE PARK is about a family as well - or about two families, a couple who want to sell their home, and, fifty years later, two people who need to sell their aunt's house - the same residence, after fifty years of neighborhood and economic change.

At Open Stage of Harrisburg, and directed by Donald Alsedek, the couple, Russ (Dan Burke) and Bev (Valerie Rae Smith), who are selling their home, and their dead son, whose memories haunt the house sufficiently for the couple to feel the need to leave. It's not really about how much closer the new development is to Russ's office. Dan Burke gives one of his best performances as Russ, the uncommunicative man who's barely holding together as the family plans its move, and Smith is convincing as Bev, a woman so flustered by life and by the move that her greatest concern, the only one small enough for her to handle and to maintain control, is how to get rid of an unused chafing dish. While the show's themes are racial and class based, there's a gender gap as well in this first act - Russ and Bev, though married for years, communicate poorly, but Russ has no difficulty with his friend Jim, the minister (Benjamin Koontz).

White male privilege is the basis of the first act. Whites own the neighborhood - African-Americans should not. Men are superior to women, who aren't particularly bright. And Betsy (Kimorie Cherry), community leader Karl's wife, is hearing impaired as well as pregnant, which makes her the subject of enforced incapacity and infantilism; she's told what to do and ordered about as if her need to read lips renders her a level of inferiority below Bev's maid, Francine (Jennette Harrison). When Karl Lindner from the community association arrives, A RAISIN IN THE SUN walks in the door. Lindner is the one white character in RAISIN, the community association representative who attempts to buy "those" people out of moving to Clybourne Park. It's a small part, but a pivotal one as there he appears to speak for all whites. In CLYBOURNE PARK he doesn't - Bev, for one, doesn't see why her maid Francine and her husband Albert (Jeremy Patterson) shouldn't be able to live in the neighborhood if they wanted to, and Russ appears to be completely unconcerned about the racial composition of his neighbors. Their characters are as true to 1959 as was Lindner's - it has always taken all kinds.

Stuart Landon makes a perfect Lindner, the suited, slick-haired Rotarian and would-be neighborhood savior, devoted to the disabled wife he doesn't quite realize is belittled by the world around her, but his transformation in the second act - all the actors play a different set of characters fifty years later in the second act - is perhaps the best of all of the actors' role changes. He becomes Steve, the would-be regentrifier married to Lindsey (Cherry), who wants a koi pond in the yard of their new house - the house that was once Russ and Bev's but that's now a mainstay of a down-at-the-heels, primarily minority, neighborhood. In fact, what Lindner predicted would happen to the neighborhood did happen, though it's not because of the Younger family. Steve is the complete opposite of Lindner - dumpy where Lindner is fit, casual where Lindner is suited and formal, careless where Lindner is punctilious. He's uncouth where Lindner watches every word falling from his lips. The only thing that connects them (it isn't Landon's body, so good is his transformation from Karl Lindner to Steve) is Lindner's overt, period racism that becomes Steve's easy assumption of white, middle-class privilege.

Cherry is better in the second act as Lindsey, the "let me call the architect," tear-down-the-house regentrifier than she is as Betsy, not because she isn't a fine actress, but because Betsy's deaf-from-birth-speak doesn't quite sound spot-on. Admittedly, it's hard to do well. (The attempted sign language used by other characters is worse, though it's not supposed to be fluent.) Dan Burke switches from Russ to Dan, a handyman who is discovering the most fascinating things about the yard, and dragging Steve with him to see them, while a conference ensues about the house sale - local residents are now apprehensive about selling to the middle-class family, for fear that regentrification will destroy the area's charm and historic housing as money and new home plans flood in. Koontz now becomes Tom, the real estate agent, and Smith, once Bev, is now Kathy, the purchasers' attorney. Harrison and Patterson are particularly effective as Lena and Kevin, the sellers whose aunt was apparently one of the Youngers - just as Kathy is Karl Lindner's daughter. Harrison's controlled fury at regentrification, and Patterson's at political correctness, drive some excellent acting in one particularly rough moment.

The first act features a group of people all trying to be on their best and most repressed behavior who devolve into physical violence in a nicely done fight scene. The second act features a group of people, already bickering, who fall out of political correctness and into scathing comment on race, gender, and sexual orientation, centered around Steve's careless determination to tell a joke he just heard from an African-American that's full of unnecessary racial commentary - and more than likely homophobic, which doesn't help, since the real estate agent is gay. From that point, the devolution continues, with a string of alleged jokes clearly determined to insult as many groups as humanly possible, all in Steve's and Kevin's determination to "clear the air".

The show, or at least the second half, isn't for anyone who can't handle both offensive discourse and strong language, though as an artistic matter they're necessary to address the plot as it's evolved to that point. If you aren't able to get beyond hearing offensive humor to an understanding of why it's there, or if you aren't able to get past some blatantly offensive cursing to understand why it's there, this is not your show - and it's not a show for younger children due to those points and others (there's a suicide story line that runs throughout it, among other matters). If, alternatively, you're up to an intelligent discourse on race, class, and the other "-isms" running through society, especially the ones whose nature hasn't changed, but which have merely disguised themselves under new rhetoric, this is a compelling, charged, beautifully-written show. Burke, Smith, and Landon give especially fine performances throughout.

At Open Stage through May 3. Call 717-232-6736 or visit openstagehbg.com for tickets.

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