Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
by Bruce Norris, directed by Joel Greenberg
Studio 180 and Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
April 5-28, 2012
“There Goes the Neighbourhood”
Studio 180 is current presenting the Canadian premiere of Bruce Norris’s satiric comedy Clybourne Park that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Studio 180 has made a name for itself in staging powerful, serious plays about important social and political topics such as anti-semitism in Our Class and anti-gay sentiment at the onset of the AIDS crisis in The Normal Heart both last year. Clybourne Park is a departure for the company, for although is treats the serious topic of racial discrimination is does so in a comic way. “Ay, there’s the rub”, as Hamlet might say. Though Joel Greenberg, who has directed all of Studio 180’s productions, excels at serious drama, he doesn’t seem to have a knack for comedy.
The play takes its name from the all-white neighbourhood where the African-American family of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun plan to move at the end of that play. It even includes the only white character in Hansberry’s play, Karl Lindner, a man to comes to offer the Youngers money not to move into Clybourne Park. Norris’s play is set in the very house that the Youngers do eventually move into. Act 1 takes place in 1959 while the present white tenants are planning to move out and Act 2 takes place in 2009 where a descendant of the Youngers and her husband are trying to prevent the house from being torn down by a white couple who want permission to build an oversized house on the lot.
Norris’s play is extremely clever not only in providing a prelude and postlude to Hansberry’s play but in doubling all seven characters who appear in Act 1 with roughly equivalent characters in Act 2. Indeed, the play is intriguing in making us determine to what extent the character an actor plays in Act 1 is or is not like the one he or she plays in Act 2.
In Act 1 Michael Healey plays Russ, the owner of the house, who spends most of the time sitting in his favourite chair in his pajamas doing nothing to pack, while his wife Bev (Maria Ricossa), rushes about in concern rather like Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver. Unlike the Cleavers, Russ and Bev have a maid, Francine (Audrey Dwyer), who would like to finish her day’s work to be with her husband Albert (Sterling Jarvis). Russ and Bev’s seemingly mindless discussion about why “Neapolitan” is the demonym for Naples is interrupted first by Jim (Jeff Lillico), the local minister, who wants to help Russ, and then by Karl Lindner (Mark McGrinder) and his pregnant, hearing-impaired wife Betsy (Kimwun Perehinec). Karl wants Russ to help him and other neighbours block the sale of the house to a black family since they are worried about the resulting decline in their property values. Eventually we discover the source of Russ’s overreaction to both Jim and Karl. Kenneth, Russ and Bev’s son, was so disturbed by his actions during his tour of duty in the Korean War that he committed suicide shortly after he returned home. That is why Russ has had to price the house so low, low enough that a black family can afford it, and that is why he resents anyone trying to cheer him up since he is still in the depths of depression.
What should happen is that various odd aspects in what seems to be a light comedy should finally gel and emerge as a family tragedy. Karl’s attempt to use Francine and Albert to prove that black people would not actually want to live in a white neighbourhood should be cringingly funny because it is so overtly racist. Neither of these happens. Bev and Russ’s debate about cities and their demonyms seems artificial. Ricossa seems too intelligent to be the airheaded 1950s wife she is playing and Healey merely seems sullen and lazy than deeply depressed. As a director Greenberg appears to have tries to make the action funny by removing its subtext. The social realities are so important to him that Karl’s rampant racism strikes us as appalling rather than laughable because it is so outrageous.
Act 2 fairs better but only achieves the snappy pacing comedy should have in its last half. Here we find Maria Ricossa playing Kathy, the now grown-up daughter of Karl and Betsy of Act 1. She is a lawyer for the absent architect who is trying to help in the negotiations between Lena and Kevin (Dwyer and Jarvis), who want to preserve the historical character of the neighbourhood, versus Steve and Lindsey (McGrinder and Perehinec), who want to tear down the old house and to build a larger house. Lena, in fact, is introduced as the grandniece the materfamilias Lena Younger, who buys the house in A Raisin in the Sun. Jeff Lillico is Tom who is trying to mediate between the two groups. Michael Healey is is Dan, a construction worker, who is the main source of interruption just as others interrupted him in Act 1.
The structure of Act 2 is very much like Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage (2006), where a façade of social politeness gradually decays and the hidden rancour between all parties emerges in name-calling and assault. In Reza the rankling division between the two couples is class. In Norris it’s race, and again McGrinder becomes the mouthpiece for the most egregious racial remarks. The difference is that in Act 1 Perehinec as his wife Betsy was literally deaf to the worst of what he was saying. In Act 2 as his wife Lindsey is outraged and embarrassed to discover her husband is a racist. Also, Dwyer and Jarvis remained silent in the face of the racist suppositions that McGrinder as Karl flung their way. Now in Act 2 the two fight back, unafraid to label his behaviour for what it is.
In Act 2, Greenberg is much more successful in bringing out the emotion of the serious epilogue that ends the play than he is in managing timing of what should be the comic dialogue that precedes it. In both acts Dwyer, Jarvis, Lillico and Perehinec are the best at conveying an inner life to their characters so that we can guess what they are thinking even when they are silent, while Healey, McGrinder and Ricossa strangely do not.
Designer David Boechler has created one of the most realistically detailed sets I’ve seen at the Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs since Christina Poddubiuk’s set for Trying in 2005. It’s worth staying in your during intermission just to see how ingeniously he is able to change the respectable but old-fashioned room of Act 1 into the decrepit space of Act 2. His costumes amusingly capture the quirks of both the Fifties and the Noughties.
While Clybourne Park may have one the Pulitzer Prize, but in insight it’s quite a long way from such recent winners such as August: Osage County (2008) or Topdog/Underdog (2002) not to mention such classics as Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1957), A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) or Our Town (1938). The play seems rather more clever than profound with the fairly simplistic message that racism still persists even our supposedly more enlightened times. That being the case, the play requires a more theatrical approach than Greenberg is able to give it. The displays in the lobby and in the programme about urban development in various periods shows that Theatre 180 is more focussed on the play as social message, such as it is, than as effective comedy. Meanwhile, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was nominated for four Tony Awards in 1960, but won none, and the musical Fiorello! won the Pulitzer Prize. Clearly, winning an annually awarded prize is no guarantee of real worth.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Audrey Dwyer, Michael Healey, Sterling Jarvis, Kimwun Perehinec and Mark McGrinder. ©2012 Karri North.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2012-04-13
Clybourne Park