Property News · April 27, 2016

Clybourne Park review – property drama drives a bulldozer through liberal pieties


Richmond theatreBruce Norris’s incendiary and excruciatingly funny play, which explores racial tensions and gentrification, gets a finely acted revivalIn Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, the African American Younger family are visited by a member of the residents committee from the largely all-white Chicago suburb where they plan to move. He tries to buy them off. How far we have really come in 50 years is the question at the heart of Bruce Norris’s thoughtful, slyly provocative play, which is directly inspired by Hansberry’s classic, and suggests that our willingness to love our neighbour evaporates when property values are threatened. In act one, set in 1959, a grieving couple – shattered by the suicide of their son in the house – are so eager to move that they’ve sold their property to the Youngers at a knock-down price. The excruciatingly funny second half, which utilises some effective doubling, is set in the same house in 2009. A young white couple moving into the now mostly black neighbourhood are astonished to discover that the community are anything other than grateful for their arrival. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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