An homage to Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Clybourne Park examines the evolution of a Chicago neighborhood over a 50-year time span. Act One takes place in 1959, as white community leaders anxiously try to stop the sale of a home to a Black family. Act Two is set in the same house in 2009, as the now predominantly African American neighborhood battles to hold its ground in the face of gentrification. With the same cast appearing in both acts, Clybourne Park examines how people and places evolve over time and play different roles in society’s progress—or the hindrance thereof.

Originally staged Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2010, Clybourne Park is one of two plays to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and both the Olivier and Tony Awards for Best New Play.

The Story

The Reason

One read of Clybourne Park and I knew that it was a play that Dirt Dogs would want to tackle, and the sort of play that needed tackling. The dialogue in Clybourne Park is like a contact sport and its subject is like a boxing match. The play presents the house as territory that needs defending and the advantage repeatedly changes hands until the final bell sounds. Like a boxing ring, the play puts its fighters in four corners but the action really takes place in the center.  As each character battles to hold their ground, we in the audience are exposed to ideas and ideals that knock us off our feet.

Each act in this play gives us positions, perspectives, and questions to consider. The questions are not easily answered, leaving us all plenty of room to discuss, learn, and carry forward new ways of viewing the territory around us. As you take in this very entertaining play, you are also challenged to think and consider others: what we have in common and what makes us unique, and how each is vitally important to a diverse community. As Bev says toward the end of Act 1, “Maybe we should learn what the other person eats. Maybe that would be the solution to some of the — if someday we could all sit down together, at one big table, and, and, and...”

Enjoy this fascinating exploration of territorial humans that requires us to examine the space around us.