About the Play:

Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Winner of the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play

Clybourne Park is a full-length comedy by Bruce Norris. This excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and real estate. Clybourne Park begins in 1959 as a black family moves into a white neighbourhood, and in Act Two takes us to the same house in 2009 as gentrification sets in and the roles are reversed. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same fifty years on?

Clybourne Park explodes in two outrageous acts set fifty years apart. Act One takes place in 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price. This enables the first black family into a fictional Chicago neighborhood (borrowing a plot line from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun) creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. Nervous community leaders anxiously try to stop the sale of a home to a black family. Act Two is set the present day, the same property is being bought by a young white couple Lindsey and Steve, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval as the now predominantly African-American neighbourhood battles to hold its ground in the face of gentrification. Jokes fly and hidden agendas unfold as two generations tiptoe through social politics, pitting race against real estate. Its carefully crafted dialogue won this play a Pulitzer Prize and made it one of the most often produced plays in the last few years. One ensemble of actors play two sets of characters in the play. 

Clybourne Park premiered in 2010 at Playwrights Horizons in New York and won both the Tony Award for Best Play and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The play received its UK premiere 2010 at the Royal Court Theatre in London and was the winner of 3 major awards for Best Play: Olivier Award, Evening Standard, and Critics' Circle. The play enjoyed widespread acceptance among leading regional theatres, and has become a popular choice for school and community theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 4 male

What people say:

"Vital, sharp-witted and ferociously smart." — New York Times

"A theatrical treasure … Indisputably, uproariously funny." — Entertainment Weekly

"A savagely funny and insightful time bomb." — Hollywood Reporter

"...applies a modern twist to the issues of race and housing and aspirations for a better life ...one of its feistiest, funniest evenings in years." — The Washington Post

"Funny as hell … The theater shakes with gales of laughter." — New York Post

"Courageous … Norris's elegantly structured play nails marital tensions as much as it does racial disharmony in an evening of ebullient provocation." — The Guardian (UK)

About the Author:

Bruce Norris is an American actor and Pultzer Prize-winning playwright who has on ongoing collaboration with Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago. He is also the recipient of the Steinberg Playwright Award and the Whiting Foundation Prize for Drama, as well as two Joseph Jefferson Awards for Best New Work. He currently resides in New York.