Clybourne Park Dramaturgy Research Packet
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Dramaturgy Research Packet For The CenterStage Production of: Clybourne Park By Bruce Norris Directed by Derrick Sanders Production Dramaturg Gavin Witt Dramaturgy Research compiled by LaRonika Thomas The Hansberry’s House – 6140 S. Rhodes Avenue - 1 - ABOUT THE AUTHOR – BRUCE NORRIS – p.3 DRAMATIC CONTEXT – A RAISIN IN THE SUN – p. 17 Lorraine Hansberry – p. 17 A Raisin in the Sun - Synopsis and Information – p. 20 Quotations – A Raisin in the Sun – p. 22 A Raisin in the Sun Character Information – p. 22 Inspiration for a Title – p. 24 MAJOR THEMES IN CLYBOURNE PARK – p. 25 1959 – A Timeline – p. 25 Chicago and Race Relations – p. 27 Chicago – Neighborhoods and Housing – p. 52 The Hansberry House & the Legal Battle Over Housing – p. 68 Restrictive Covenants – p. 71 Urban Development & Gentrification – p. 73 Translating to Baltimore – p. 82 Concepts of “Home” – p. 92 Soldiers / Depression / Suicide – p. 112 PROTOCOL FOR CLYBOURNE PARK – p. 122 OTHER PRODUCTIONS – REVIEWS & CRITICISM – p. 126 Clybourne Park – p. 126 A Raisin in the Sun – p. 135 OTHER PRODUCTIONS – DRAMATURGICAL MATERIALS – p. 143 Materials from the Steppenwolf Production – p. 143 Materials from the Lincoln Center Theater Production – p. 150 - 2 - ABOUT THE AUTHOR – BRUCE NORRIS Bruce Norris in the Danger Zone Why does the 'ClyBourne Park' playwright put such a premium on the freedom to provoke? An interview By Beatrice Basso Introduced By Dan RuBin TCG – American Theatre – September 2011 Source: http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/oct11/brucenorris.cfm Since making his 1992 playwriting debut with The Actor Retires, playwright Bruce Norris has earned a reputation for unceremoniously prodding the uncomfortable truths that lie just beneath the surface of the self-aware, middle-class liberal. "There's nothing better than coming into a room and feeling that something dangerous is happening," he told London's Evening Standard last year upon winning the paper's best-play award for Clybourne Park—just one of a spate of prizes the play has captured on both sides of the Atlantic, topped by the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in the U.S. and the Olivier Award for best play in the U.K. A bracing examination of racism in America viewed through the prism of property ownership, Clybourne Park has had successful runs in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. (where it broke box-office records at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company), and London. And now it's high on the list of most-produced works in the 2011–12 season, with productions scheduled at Denver's Curious Theatre Company, Philadelphia's Arden Theatre, L.A.'s Center Theatre Group, Actor's Theatre of Charlotte in North Carolina, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Trinity Repertory Company of Providence, R.I., and Studio 180 in Toronto. The CTG production is expected to move from the Mark Taper Forum to Broadway in spring 2012. Playwriting was a shift for Houston-born Norris, who was in the throes of a successful career as an actor when he decided to pen The Actor Retires. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1982 with a theatre degree, he worked at the major Chicago theatres before moving to New York City, where he appeared on Broadway in Biloxi Blues, An American Daughter and Wrong Mountain. He also performed Off-Broadway and regionally, and was, he says, "hired and fired from a number of television pilots." These experiences were fodder for his first play, a comedy about an actor who throws out his headshots, fires his agent and decides to make furniture for a living. Today Norris is not building furniture (in fact, he originally planned to be a set designer before he discovered it involved "too much manual labor"), but over the past two decades he has built quite a body of work as a playwright known for his ability to make his audiences simultaneously laugh and squirm. - 3 - ABOUT THE AUTHOR – BRUCE NORRIS Norris's 2005 hit, The Pain and the Itch, certainly had this effect at Steppenwolf, which has produced six of his premieres, including The Infidel (2000), Purple Heart (2002), We All Went Down to Amsterdam (2003), The Unmentionables (2006) and A Parallelogram. The Pain and the Itch, which landed Chicago's Joseph Jefferson Award for best new work, takes place over a Thanksgiving dinner amid post–9/11 paranoia in a suburban home. A self-professed liberal and well-balanced couple must deal with inexplicably half-gnawed avocadoes and the genital rash of the family's four-year-old daughter, while the husband's brother skewers the hypocrisy of their lives and his Eastern European female guest casually rattles off racist quips. "I have no cogent manifesto," Norris told London's Observer in 2007 after The Pain and the Itch opened at the Royal Court Theatre. "I just have a whole bunch of psychological kinks. Like the desire to unmask the lies about the American family." Unlike Lorraine Hansberry—whose seminal 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun served as the jumping-off point for Clybourne Park—Norris does not believe that theatre is a particularly good catalyst for change. "There is no political value in having sensitive feelings about the world. I don't think it generates political action. You go, you watch, you say, 'That's sad,' and then you go for a steak. The best you can hope for is to make people slightly uncomfortable. At least if you take the piss out of the audience, they feel they are being addressed," he argues. This is also why he writes plays with white middle-class characters: "Why should I write something that is not germane to audiences' lives? Theatre has always been an expensive middle-class pursuit. It is a precious, pretentious thing for precious, pretentious people. You drive in your expensive car to the theatre, get it valet parked, and then watch a play about poor people. Why?" Norris aims to expose the hypocrisies of bourgeois America without indicting or protecting anyone in the process. Whenever we are tempted to side with one of his characters over another, to align ourselves with a seemingly safe and sound modus operandi, or to condemn someone once and for all, Norris pulls the rug out from under that character (and us), and we're left to look for our next psychological alliance. Fundamentally, every one of Norris's characters is trying to do and say the right thing for themselves and their loved ones—but they fail because they are forced into unfamiliar interactions with unfamiliar people. Are our liberal ideals sustainable, he forces us to ask, outside the safety of the middle-class, suburban bubble? On the first day of rehearsals for Clybourne Park last winter at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, Norris remarked that A Raisin in the Sun, which was part of school curricula in the 1970s, was one of the first plays (along with Our Town) that he became aware of as a young person. "That play has resonated all through my life, because I realized that the only character I could identify with was Karl—I was a whitey - 4 - ABOUT THE AUTHOR – BRUCE NORRIS in an all-white neighborhood in Houston, Texas." In Clybourne Park, Norris focuses his sharp lens on our past (1959 in Act 1) and present (2009 in Act 2) consciousness of race and neighborly relations. In a phone interview a few weeks before rehearsals began in San Francisco, Clybourne Park production dramaturg Beatrice Basso asked Norris about his views on race relations in the United States and his need to provoke. BEATRICE BASSO: Clybourne Park is so quintessentially American, yet it has done very well in London. Why do you think that is? BRUCE NORRIS: The issues are pretty close. They've got a version of the same thing in London. There may be a different ethnic distribution of who's resentful towards whom, but the same thing happens again and again. In fact, one of the guys in the cast living in Brixton told me the story of that neighborhood and how it has changed over the years. It's the same thing, really. BB: And yet the white-black divide is nowhere more pronounced than in the United States. BN: Chicago is particularly distinct that way. The South Side of Chicago is a predominantly black area; the North Side of Chicago is white. And then you've got Indian and South Asian and other neighborhoods, but the white and black are pretty much divided along the north and south. You think, this is a function of discrimination or of people being priced out of the housing market or all sorts of conspiracy theories, and yet, at the same time, there's nothing keeping one of us white people from moving into Harlem or South Chicago or Oakland. Or the other way around. Even if prices in white neighborhoods are higher, how come there's not more movement? How come we don't voluntarily integrate? I think it has to do with discomfort—with feeling like you're the minority. It's uncomfortable to live in an area where you are that minority, no matter which way it works. BB: People who are not from the U.S., and I am one of them, complain that there's so much political correctness about race here that it's impossible to make jokes about it; but then the longer we are here, the clearer it becomes that there are scars that are simply too deep to be made fun of. BN: I was reading something recently about a person in Germany who made what he thought was a funny remark about Nazis, and of course that's not actually a very funny subject if you're German.