Playwright Bruce Norris has no use for writing scripts that do not provoke audiences. Typical of his work, if there is such a thing, is Clybourne Park, which looks at race relations in this country and suggests that communities change faster than our racial attitudes.
“Well, we’ve obviously made some very important political strides and obviously some very important things have changed. However, I think those things are sort of superficial,” Norris says. “It’s kind of like spackling. We’ve covered up a lot of holes, but I’m not sure we’ve changed our human nature. And I think our human nature is to hate everyone according to whatever we can hate them for at any given moment.”
To further rile theatergoers, Norris has chosen as the basis for Clybourne Park that sacred cow of the civil rights movement, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 A Raisin in the Sun, turning it inside out for satire’s sake. “It’s such an iconic play about a period in history and I thought, ‘Therefore, it’s ripe for a kind of iconic update.’ Or a revisitation from the other point of view.”
Hansberry wrote about the African-American Younger family, which tried to cement its tenuous hold on a piece of the American Dream by moving into an all-white neighborhood in Chicago. Not surprisingly for the late ‘50s, they met with considerable resistance.
Having grown up in an all-white neighborhood in Houston, Texas, Norris quickly recognized himself in A Raisin in the Sun — as the villain of the piece. “Even from an early age I sort of thought to myself, ‘Gosh, that’s me. I’m the antagonist in the play,’” he says. “I grew up in an anti-integration neighborhood and school district. That’s always been my people, so I have to be honest about how I approach the conversation about race. I approach it from that very wrong-headed background.”
Instead of showing the Youngers, Norris takes us inside the home in question, to portray the previously unseen couple that is intent on selling the property to them. Then, in the second act, the play jumps forward 50 years. Now the neighborhood is predominantly black and a white couple is trying to buy its way onto the block, to tear down the house and build a McMansion far larger than the homes around it.
What begins civilly soon breaks down along racial lines, with tensions further ignited by the telling of some overtly offensive racial jokes.
Norris concedes he is out to make audiences uncomfortable. “Sure, and hopefully in a way that makes them laugh, too. The perfect combination of responses for me is when people laugh and it’s followed by a groan,” he says.
Analyzing the response to the play’s politically incorrect humor, Norris says, “Well, part of what they’re laughing at is that they have laughed. It’s the fact of sitting in a theater with a bunch of other people, some of whom are not the same race as you, and hearing these things and having to wonder, ‘Am I permitted to respond to this? And if I do respond, what has that said about me?’ ”
The 50-year time shift and the leap to an entirely different cast of characters is a tricky thing to pull off, as Florida Stage learned this fall with Cane. Norris seems unconcerned by the challenge.
“Listen, I think an audience is much better served by remaining in the dark for as long as they can possibly stand it, because then you have something called suspense, where they’re trying to figure out what’s going on, instead of being told in the first three minutes of the act so they can nod off and go to sleep.”
There are parallels between the two acts, but Norris suggests that audience members not worry about them. “They’re essentially two separate plays that have little sinews that connect the two of them,” he says. “But they’re separate groups of people and hopefully your enjoyment of the second act is not dependent on trying to draw those connections.”
Clybourne Park landed on the 10 best lists of 2010 of The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, as well as winning the Evening Standard Award for best new play in London this season. It may become quite popular among adventuresome regional theaters, but when the Caldwell Theatre’s artistic director Clive Cholerton asked Norris for the performance rights to Clybourne Park, it was a no-brainer for Norris to agree.
“At first it looked like no one was going to do the play, so when he asked for them, he was the first of two,” Norris says. “He was a pioneer in that way.”
Norris is often surprised when his plays are well-received, but less so that the British took to Clybourne Park.
“I think the Brits are very ready to laugh at any depiction of Americans as failed buffoons. They love that, but y’know, it was a big success in D.C. as well. It’s just that in London, no one cared if Americans were depicted badly.”
CLYBOURNE PARK, Caldwell Theatre Co., 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Continuing through Sunday, Feb. 6. Tickets: $27-$75. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.