Clybourne Park is a 2011 stage play written by Bruce Norris.
It is both a prequel to, sequel to, and Perspective Flip of 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun. The story unfolds in two parts. Part 1 is set in 1959. A married couple, Russ and Bev, have sold their home to a black family and are moving away. They are visited by a racist neighbor, Karl, who tries to persuade them to not sell. The family that Russ and Bev are selling to, not seen, are the Youngers from A Raisin in the Sun, and Karl is a character in that play. In fact this part of the play is set a couple of hours after the scene in A Raisin in the Sun where Karl tries and fails to buy the Youngers out.
Part II is set 50 years later, in 2009. In the intervening decades, the Clybourne Park neighborhood filled up with mostly black homeowners. A white couple, Steve and Lindsay, have bought the house that the Youngers bought 50 years ago, and are planning to demolish it. They are having a meeting with Lena and Kevin, residents of the area, who have organized a petition objecting to Steve and Lindsay's plan to build a house taller than any other in the neighborhood. A cordial meeting devolves into hostility, as it eventually becomes clear that what Lena and Kevin (mainly Lena) object to is white gentrification of their neighborhood.
Tropes:
- Call-Back: In Act I, Russ buries his son's footlocker, with the suicide note, in the backyard. In Act II, Dan the handyman (who is played by the same actor) unearths the footlocker and reads the note.
- Dramatic Irony: The very end of the play is set back in 1959, and has Bev cheerfully saying "I really believe things are about to change for the better," while Kenneth is shown writing his suicide note.
- Driven to Suicide: In the backstory to Act I. It's revealed that Russ and Bev's son Kenneth, who came home from the Korean War with PTSD and was accused of killing civilians, hanged himself. In fact, that is why Russ was willing to sell cheap to the Younger family, and why he turns a deaf ear to the complaints of neighborhood racists like Karl, who shunned Russ's son.
- Flashback: The play ends with a flashback to 1959 in which Kenneth is writing his suicide note, while his mother chats at him, blissfully unaware.
- History Repeats: The whole concept of the play. In both acts, unwelcome new arrivals are coming into the neighborhood and buying the new house, and both are harbingers of demographic change. Each act has characters initially being civil before bursting into ugly arguments. Each act has a character saying the line "But you can't live in a principle"—Karl in Act I when he's trying to argue why black people shouldn't be let into Clybourne Park, and Kevin in Act II when explaining why Lena is so intent on stopping the new construction (her aunt lived there). There are also closer parallels between characters: each act has a woman that's heavily pregnant (Betsy in Act I and Lindsay in Act II). Each act has a man of lower status (Albert in Act I, Dan in Act II), put a hand on one of the men involved in a nasty argument, enraging that man further. The fact that Act II has the same actors playing different characters further emphasizes this.
- Perspective Flip: On A Raisin in the Sun. Karl, a character from that play who tries to buy out the Youngers, arrives at Russ and Bev's house in the first act of this play immediately after his scene in that one.
- Precision F-Strike:
- Rev. Jim gets a little too pushy at trying to get Russ to talk, finally says of their late son Kenneth that "he's in a better place." This snaps the last of Russ's patience, and he says "What I think I might have to do is...uh, politely ask you to, uh [clears throat]...well, to go fuck yourself."
- Averted in Act II where curse words fly freely.
- Prison Rape: Steve manages to offend/upset everyone with a joke that's both racist and homophobic about a black man raping a white man in prison.
- Real Time: While there's a 50-year time skip in the middle, each individual act plays out in real time as a single scene.
- The Reveal: Kathy mentions that she's the daughter of a couple who lived in the neighborhood and that her mother was deaf—in other words, she's the daughter of Karl and Betsy from Act I.
- Seinfeldian Conversation: The play opens with Bev wondering what the origin of the word "Neapolitan" is. After Russ tells her it's a descriptor for people of Naples, the conversation veers to what people from other cities are called. Russ enjoys saying "Muscovites."
- Some of My Best Friends Are X: Lindsay, when she feels she's getting called out as racist, says "Half of my friends are black!" Her husband Steve challenges her to name them, and Lindsay can only come up with one.
- Speech-Centric Work: Two acts of people in a single location, talking.
- Time Skip: 50 years between each act.
- Villainous Gentrification: Lena believes that Steve and Lindsay are the thin wedge of this, and goes so far as to state that there's an organized plot to gentrify black neighborhoods.
- You Look Familiar: Invoked. The stage directions specify that all the characters in Act II be played by the same actors as in Act I. This leads to some contrasts, like how the same actress plays Francine the maid who is careful to be circumspect around white people in 1959, and Lena the assertive woman who outright states that gentrification is a plot.
