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Clybourne Park (2010)

by Bruce Norris(Favorite Author)

3.88 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

184842132X (ISBN13: 9781848421325)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Nick Hern Books

review 1: I love ideas like this--take an existing piece of literature and tweak it a little and create something entirely new. The first act of this wonderful and thought provoking play takes place at the same time as "A Raisin in the Sun." It is the story of the family that is selling their house to Hansberry's Youngers. Act 2 jumps ahead 50 years; the previously all white neighborhood has changed and changed again, and gentrifiers with money are heading to town.A real conversation starter, lots of great ideas about how we do, and have, looked at race, and real estate, and the intersecting of the two; the haves and the have nots; what owning a house can mean.
review 2: Part Raisin in the Sun, part Arcadia with its overlapping eras! and more than a whiff of Piano Lesson... more -- Clybourne Park explores the change of neighborhood. First in block busting as the first black family moves in, and then with the question of gentrification. Of course, the characters carry more than the schematics of politics and social change. Norris weaves in human stories: place is made up of our lives, the hopes that are never quite we get fulfilled.Norris does an interesting move by using the same cast in both acts (1950s and 00s). As the second act unfolds there are repeated rhymes in topic and content with the first act. Structurally, il am not convinced by the emotional build of the second act -- are Steve and Lindsey really that stressed? Well maybe, although it may be more my theatrical lavkofimaination.Finally as to the topic of race,and particularly that turning on race, the play provides a useful counterpoint nt to the themes raised by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his great essay on reparations (Atlantic, June 2014). less

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