Seeing Hillbarn Theatre’s current production of “Clybourne Park” should be a priority for anyone who wants to have a serious think about the role of race relations today and what that means: how it may affect friends, families, institutions and communities—especially those who don’t even have a clue that they are racist.
Playwright Bruce Norris’ smart, topical dramedy won two plum awards: The 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play. Under the strong direction of Phaedra T. Boughton, Hillbarn’s production shows why it deserved those honors.
The play’s first and second acts are 50 years apart, pointing up how race relations have changed—and how they haven’t. Act 1 takes place in 1959 in an affluent Chicago neighborhood called Clybourne Park, while Act 2 is set there in 2009.
In Act 1, a middle-aged White couple, naive Bev (Mary Lou Torre) and her taciturn husband Russ (Ron Dritz) are packing up their home in preparation for their move out of Clybourne Park.
Though they dearly love their home, they’re hoping to get a fresh start somewhere else because their only child, Kenny, killed himself in their house. A Korean War veteran, Kenny returned from the war mentally unstable because he had to carry out the orders of his superior officers to murder innocent men, women and children.
As the couple packs, their friend Karl (a riveting Scott Reardon) tells them in a tortuously lengthy, roundabout manner, they have—apparently unwittingly—sold their home to a Negro family, not something that sits well in that neighborhood at that time.
Act 2 is set in the same home, now in the middle of a remodel with new paint on some walls, a cool white-brick fireplace at one side and a modern front door. Clybourne Park is now an all-Black neighborhood but is slowly gentrifying. A White couple (Reardon and Caitlin Gjerdrum) want to buy, raze and rebuild the house but are forced to negotiate local regulations with a Black couple (Anju Hyppolite and Ron Chapman) representing the housing board. The meeting goes way off point when Reardon’s character is goaded into telling a racist, homophobic joke.
It’s unclear why director Boughton decided to have the house in Act 2 be undergoing renovation, rather than have graffiti on the walls and random holes punched through the drywall as the playwright intended.
Otherwise, Eric Olson’s scenic design is nicely done, Pam Lampkin’s costumes are appropriate for the two different time frames, and Ed Hunter’s lighting and Jules Indelicato’s sound all work well.
As difficult as the subject matter is, it’s as relevant today as it was when Norris wrote it. And it’s as applicable on the San Francisco Peninsula as it was in south Chicago.
“Clybourne Park” runs Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. through Oct. 30 at Hillbarn Theatre, 1285 E Hillsdale Blvd., Foster City. Tickets are $32-$60 at www.hillbarntheatre.org or 650-349-6411, ext. 2.
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