Review: The Fugard's CLYBOURNE PARK a 'Woke' Look at White Privilege and Gentrification

American poet and dramatist Archibald MacLeish, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his play J.B., observed in an interview with Benjamin DeMott for The Paris Review that 'we talk about the play within the play: there is also a play without the play -which contains everything.' When CLYBOURNE PARK premiered in 2010, its resonance with American audiences caught in the 'play without the play' set Bruce Norris's satirical response to Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A RAISIN IN THE SUN on a path that led to the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and, in 2012, the Tony Award for Best Play. The Fugard Theatre's production of the play arrives at a time when South Africa is caught up in the 'play without the play,' where the gentrification trend and the problems caused by white privilege denialism intersect.

There is a minor character in A RAISIN IN THE SUN named Karl who, when the black Younger family puts down a deposit on a house in the all-white suburb where he lives, rallies his neighbours into buying out the Youngers. The people of Clybourne Park, he says, believe that 'Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities.' In CLYBOURNE PARK, we see the other side of Karl's hustle, as he tries to convince the house's sellers, Russ and Bev, to withdraw their acceptance of the offer to purchase their home. Tensions run high, with Francine, Russ and Bev's housekeeper, and her husband, Albert, eventually being drawn into the argument, leading to a brutal climax in which bitter secrets are revealed about the dangers of othering our neighbours.

The action then springs forward a half-century, to a time when the same neighbourhood faces the scourge of gentrification. This time around, a white couple, Steve and Lindsay, are buying into what has become an all-black community, which it seems they think they will improve thanks to the attitude and access to money that their white privilege has afforded them. Leading the charge against them is Lena, who is related to the Younger family who bought the house 50 years before. Their site meeting, which everyone seems to think is a mere formality, soon transforms into a battleground where race, class and gender identity all come under fire.

Norris's play is astounding. CLYBOURNE PARK is hilarious, but it is also devastating - a first-class satire that serves as a reminder of how this challenging literary technique has applications beyond songs, sketches and political cartoons. When the characters wage war using a series of racist, classist and sexist jokes in the second act, for example, reactions from the audience range from raucous laughs to jaws dropping in horror, and CLYBOURNE PARK becomes about MacLeish's 'play without the play'. Norris wants us to catch ourselves in the moment, to consider what we are hearing and how we react to it. It makes for live theatre at its finest, a complexity of presence that recorded media can never reproduce.

Of course, it might not be live theatre at its finest were it not for Greg Karvellas's perceptive staging of the play. CLYBOURNE PARK could quite easily play out as a series of stereotypical tropes that never find a footing in the real world. But by letting the play be robust when it needs to be and reining it in when the writing takes on a more reflective tenor, Karvellas's work on CLYBOURNE PARK sees its director meet its writer on an equal playing field when it comes to both the craft and artistry of their respective fields.

The seven-strong ensemble that brings CLYBOURNE PARK to life contributes in no small measure to the dynamism and strength of the production. It is easy to focus on Andrew Buckland's marvellous comic delivery of lines about Muscovites and Ulan Bator, but to do so is to focus on a small part of his deeply moving performance as Russ in the first act of the play. His performance marvellously assimilates the full range of impulses that makes Norris's writing in this piece a multifaceted challenge for actors. So does Lesoko Seabe, whose first-act role as Francine relies greatly on reaction and vocal reflection due to the social milieu of the play, with her second act performance as Lena embracing the voice for which black women still have to fight almost sixty years later.

Scott Sparrow, Nicholas Pauling and Claire-Louise Worby make a meal of the style and comedy that characterises their first act roles as a clumsy minister, a self-involved racist and a deaf mother-to-be respectively. All three are even stronger in the second act, with Sparrow offering a sensitive reading of Tom, a gay lawyer, while Pauling and Worby present scathing depictions of Steve and Lindsay, a couple whose awareness of the privilege that their whiteness affords them remains all but unawakened. Susan Danford's Bev is caught up in that same naiveté, with the character serving as a historical reference point for Steve and Lindsay's attitudes, although Danford is afforded the opportunity to craft a more textured performance as the character ironically negotiates - in some ways - the idea of her privilege with greater awareness. Pope Jerrod delivers a stronger turn in his period role as Albert than as Kevin, Lena's co-representative from the housing board, where he seems less physically comfortable on stage, perhaps as a function of his much greater experience in film and television.

On the design front, the team that has transformed CLYBOURNE PARK from an idea on the page to a three-dimensional world on stage has accomplished exceptional work. Saul Radomsky's set design is breathtaking, a gigantic house shaped frame surrounding an exquisitely detailed interior that transforms magnificently from rose-tinted wallpaper to harshly glaring graffiti between acts. The set is exquisitely lit by Kieran McGregor, with the sense of outdoor light flooding the room creating some particularly beautiful moments. Charl-Johan Lingenfelder's sound design supports the action well, with the radio broadcasts lending a particularly effective sense of period to the production. Birrie le Roux's costumes are exquisitely designed, reflecting a nuanced understanding of both setting and character.

It is quite something to see CLYBOURNE PARK on stage in South Africa at this time, not only because of its relevance to current social dialogue, but also because this is a year when theatre-makers in this country started responding once again to the state of whiteness and the privilege it affords those who live in/with that state. Exploring this theme is nothing new in itself; we can jump back as far as 1976 to Malcolm Purkey's THE FANTASTICAL HISTORY OF A USELESS MAN or more recently to 2012 when Penelope Youngleson's EXPECTANT debuted for examples that traverse, to a greater or lesser extent, similar territory. But there is something about 2016 where the gap between theatre-makers who are "woke" and theatre-makers who are not is becoming more and more prominent. For every CLYBOURNE PARK, there is another production that either denies the very existence of the world in which we live or, having that awareness, refuses to react to it. And as consumers of theatre, the question that lies with us is, "Which you will buy into?"

CLYBOURNE PARK will run at The Fugard Theatre until 1 October 2016. Tickets, ranging from R120 to R240, can be booked online through Computicket, by telephone on 0861 915 8000 or in person at any Shoprite Checkers outlet. Bookings can also be made at the Fugard Theatre box office on 021 461 4554. The Fugard Theatre is situated in the heart of District Six, on the corner of Harrington and Caledon Streets, Cape Town. The Harrington Street car park is located at the corner of Caledon and Harrington streets and is available for the use of theatre patrons.

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