Talking About Race

Race.  It's the most sensitive subject in America, one many people think about but few are comfortable discussing.

Yet it's clearly a topic that demands attention--and not just from a handful of socially conscious "others."  Many believe that if America is to truly come to grips with this complex and often contentious issue, all of us will have to participate in these conversations, awkward as they might be.

So what better place for such a dialogue to take place than in the theatre, where playwrights are forever getting in audiences' faces about issues that make everyone squirm? 

Bruce Norris's "Clybourne Park," which opens next week at NCC, will make many squirm in their seats.  But it will also make them laugh, at times uproariously.  And with good reason: Norris's Pulitzer-prize winning play takes aim at racism and prejudice in ways that are at once thoughtful and hilarious. 

"Clybourne Park" is a sequel of sorts to Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 "Raisin in the Sun," which looks at an African-American family's struggles to make their way in an America steeped in prejudice.   Hansberry's play ends with the family preparing to move to a home in Clybourne Park, a white community that's resistant to the idea of having a black family in their midst.

Norris's play begins in the living room of the white couple planning to sell their home--unknowingly--to the African-American family of Hansberry's play.  Casual dialogue soon gives way to revelations and tensions, many involving attitudes toward race.  

The emotional intensity of the drama increases in the second act, set fifty years later in 2009.  Like the rest of America, Clybourne Park has changed, as have the identities of the residents of the house and the surrounding community.  But the characters--white and black alike--are as uncomfortable and uneasy about race as their predecessors.  In fact, they're in many ways less subtle about their prejudices, especially when their buttons have been pushed by others.  It's at these moments that the play's message becomes clear: For all of our efforts to get along, we're still incredibly ill at ease around people whose skin color differs from ours.   

You'll laugh a lot at the actions and words of the characters in "Clybourne Park."   Norris's humor is caustic, even raunchy at times.  But his play is deadly serious about its subject and will jolt you out of your comfort zone and (as good theatre often does) make you reflect on your own attitudes and behaviors. 

That's why you should make it your business to see this play, which will not only leave you with much to ponder but perhaps inspire you to take part in that long overdue conversation about race in America.  If it does, score a victory for EDUCATION, which at its best is a catalyst for change.

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"Clybourne Park" runs at NCC from June 19-22 and 25-29. For ticket information, call 572-7676.