Clybourne Park

A Pulitzer prize-winning foot-in-mouth farce that craftily weaves prejudice with property prices, but which seems in this production to have lost some of the emotional rawness and intelligence for which it was praised in its London and New York premiers.

Land, and specifically the ownership of land, is the perpetually deferred problem that essentially defines Australia’s greatest socio-economic emergency, the chasm in living standards between white Australia and black Australia. And it has been so ever since Phillip laid anchor at Sydney Cove.

This is admittedly a rather airy or even rhetorical kind of statement to lodge at the top of a theatre review, but I think that, by the playwright’s own admission, such loftiness is probably appropriate here. Norris has said in an LA Times article that Clybourne Park is about “war and territoriality and why we fight over territory”. Any local production of such a play, a play which deals in land and race, will inevitably be performed in the long shadow of our own national situation, and it must, if it is to be successful, find a way of engaging that grim reality.

I don't think that this production has really found a way of expressing how the issues raised in this play actually matter here. I mean this as a point of tone. Although there are some exceptional moments, including Bert LaBonté's furious last scene, the play's coda with Luke Ryan and Alison Whyte, and Greg Stone's impressive work in the first act as the grieving father, overall the portraits are too outlandish and ridiculous, in some cases too downright clumsy, to convey the potential value of Norris's work as anything other than a comedic insight into American race relations and an opportunity to gossip about gentrification and the housing bubble.

Norris’s play finds its historical inspiration in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 Civil Rights classic Raisin in the Sun, a play about an African-American family who purchase a house in the all-white suburb of Clybourne Park. Where Norris picks up, still in 1959, we meet the white couple who are selling out, Russ (Greg Stone) and Bev (Alison Whyte), and learn something of the tragic circumstances that have motivated them to go through with a sale that is so unpopular with the rest of the neighbourhood. Their cosy community is not, it seems, as cosy as it could be.

It’s interesting to observe in act one, which is framed as a fifties-sitcom-plus-tragedy, the way that Norris complicates the problem of racism. Racism is first mingled in with an array of other prejudices, for example against the deaf, the mentally disabled and women. All these prejudices emerge as material for the sitcom: opportunities for the audience to giggle at those closed-minded ethical positions we all imagine as typical of the 1950s. Racism, at least initially, is not the most serious crime which the Clybourne Park community are guilty of – it only the background. It is in fact the neglect of Russ and Bev's son, a veteran of the Korean War, which Norris offers as the real tragedy. Racism only comes to assume a special place in the white folks' constellation of prejudices because, as we learn, if a black family moves in, the value of neighbourhood real estate will plunge – and this is what really terrifies Karl (Patrick Brammall), the community association representative sent to twist Russ's arm.

Norris has said that what he is trying to get at are the “incredibly personal, inexplicable, ungraspable, indefinable reasons” for racial conflict. But the way in which the scene is played in this production gave me the impression that the racism is being explained – in a literary sense – by reference to falling property prices, as though the only thing about black people that makes Karl uncomfortable is their deleterious effect on market value.

The second act leaps forward to present day Clybourne Park. Just as Karl predicted, the neighbourhood, through the eighties and nineties, became economically depressed, with house prices falling as the original families sold up and moved out. Now, however, because of the neighbourhood’s proximity to downtown Chicago, the area is becoming gentrified, again. A wealthy white couple (Laura Gordon and Patrick Brammall) have purchased the house, the same house, and are planning extensive renovations. Alas for them, there has been a neighbourhood petition against their planned renovations and there are a number of restrictive covenants on the property which have to be negotiated. The scene takes place in the same room of the house as the first act with a black couple, Lena and Kevin (Zahra Newman and Bert LaBonté), attending as community representatives, along with a lawyer (Alison Whyte) and an agent (Luke Ryan).

What comes through strongly in this final act is a sort of moral critique of the mediocrity of the middle classes, an insistence that they actually be better human beings and not get so hung up with political correctness, with seeming like better human beings.

But there’s something almost cynical about this production. It's certainly a clever, confronting and perhaps even necessary drama on the state of American race and class relations, although it's hard to judge on this showing, and I think that the American social situation is relevant to the Australian situation, but I can’t help feeling that Clybourne Park comes off here as vaguely reassuring. We laugh at America's problems, but don't necessarily identify with them. With its comic clumsiness and emotional flat-footedness, I think that this play imposes a distance between Australians and the issues of land and race. America is, culturally speaking, our neighbour, and everyone knows that the middle classes enjoy nothing so much as laughing at the mediocrity and hypocrisy of their neighbours. What they struggle to do is identify that mediocrity in themselves.

Of course, the hypocrisy of the home-owning middle classes is as ripe for demolition here as it is anywhere, and there are certainly moments to make you squirm, but the most impressive impact of this production is as a satire on the human aspects of the property market. It’s no surprise that central to production is the house itself, a comprehensive set designed by Christina Smith. This makes it a somewhat gossipy play that uses the issues of race and class to make chatting about house prices more salacious, but which doesn't cut as deeply as it might.