Yes, people are tired of talking about race. Exhausted, really. And no one wants to talk about it in Clybourne Park, either. But when black folks and white folks intersect, whatever the year, decade, or century, a dialogue is taking place even if it's unspoken. That's the main message of Bruce Norris' smart, provoking, often funny, and occasionally exasperating play at ACT.
Seen earlier this year in New York, and in London last year, Clybourne Park offers a back-story to Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 A Raisin in the Sun in the first act, and then leaps ahead 50 years in the second act to offer an ironic coda to what the initial characters have wrought. In simplest terms, that would be the integration of a white neighborhood (first act) and the gentrification of a black neighborhood (second act). They are, in fact, the same neighborhoods, with the very same house as the fulcrum.
Hansberry's play dealt with the moving-on-up ambitions of the Younger family, and especially its matriarch, to leave Chicago's South Side for the more open spaces of a heretofore entirely white neighborhood. We never see the Youngers in Norris' play, but one of Hansberry's characters does show up in the newer work: the representative of a home owners' association who, in Raisin, tries to convince the Youngers that their presence in Clybourne Park would be inappropriate, and delivers a similar message to the husband and wife who have made the bold decision to sell their home to a black family.
Bold, but not exactly courageous. It turns out that the fluttery wife is shocked when she learns of her clenched husband's decision, and when his reasons are revealed, they are more of an up-yours to his neighbors than of any budding liberalism. There is also a contrived twist vaguely introduced in the first act that is fully revealed at the end of the second to conclude the play with an utterly wrong emphasis.
In cringe-worthy fashion, much of the racial conversation, as ostensibly polite as it is, is played out in front of the stoic black housekeeper and her husband who are eager to flee the situation. Dragged into the discussion, as the HOA rep argues for non-judgmental examples of differing racial interests, they have to concur that, no, there aren't many Negro skiers.
The second act flips the situation, not exactly in mirror fashion, but with enough parallels to spur deeper reflections on the evolution of race relations over the past half-century. While in 1959, segregation and racial bias were both legal and de facto standards, by 2009, laws and social propriety have practically made taboo even the acknowledgement in polite society that people come in different colors, let alone any suggestion that the color implies any cultural differences.
During the intermission, set designer Ralph Funicello's Ozzie-and-Harriet house at 406 Clybourne St. has been stripped down to a graffiti-spewed, abandoned shell. Gathered on folding chairs in the bare living room are the white couple who want to raze the house in a neighborhood that is finding renewed appeal among the gentry, and a black couple who don't want to see the proposed McMansion changing the historic character of their tidy neighborhood.
With chairs set in a semi-circle on stage, also occupied by lawyer-types representing both sides, the play moves away from drama to group discussion. How we talk about race, or largely avoid talking about it, becomes the theme that eventually envelops the characters as self-censoring mechanisms begin to falter. It becomes an aggravating conversation for the participants, and that aggravation begins to spill over into the audience, which might not be as intentional.
As written by Norris, and maintained by director Jonathan Moscone, the characters can cross over into the kind of caricatures that TV sitcoms have established over the decades. It roots the play in a familiarity that becomes more unsettling when comfort zones are breached. All cast members take on considerably differing roles as the play changes decades between the acts, and among the more notable performances in the accomplished cast are Rene Augesen as the repressed wife/cynical agent, Omoze Idehenre as the obedient housekeeper/feisty homeowner, and Gregory Wallace as the housekeeper's meek husband/reserved homeowner.
Every city and each of its neighborhoods are evolving entities, the playwright and his characters agree, but change is invariably accompanied by loss even in the guise of progress. The biggest laugh on the opening night came when, in the second act, the black veterans of the neighborhood were remembering the Jewish man who ran the grocery and was the only white person in their midst. To help the new couple place the old market, this helpful reference point is offered: You know, it's where Whole Foods is now.
Clybourne Park will run at ACT through Feb. 20. Tickets are $22-$88. Call 479-2228 or go to www.act-sf.org.