CLYBOURNE PARK Reviews

[LimelightMike]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 6:05am

Today is Thursday, April 19, marking the official opening night of Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris' Pulitzer Prize-winning play about racial and economic changes in a neighborhood over a 50-year period, at the Kerr. Please, post reviews here!

[Brian07663NJ]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 8:26am

Eager to see the reviews as well. I saw the show last week and was not impressed. This won a Pulitzer Prize? What I didn't "get" were the gasps of shock in the audience over the racial jokes. Really? It wasn't even the delivery that made it shocking so I couldn't give that to them.

[Patash]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 8:34am

Brian, how well do you know A Raisin in the Sun? I saw Clybourne Park a "couple of years ago" in its off-Broadway premiere and loved it -- but interestingly saw it quite soon after that last revival of A Raisin in the Sun. I found the connection between the two very interesting indeed.

Racial jokes? Well, they are a part of normal conversation in situations like the one in the play. Why shouldn't they be a part of it? Gasps of shock from the audience? Isn't that better than sounds of yawns?

[Brian07663NJ]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 8:50am

Patash, honestly do not know Raisin in the Sun so if I can speak as someone merely attending this one show then wouldn't that say it is a flaw for someone attending without prior knowledge of the first one? I would hope the show could stand on its own merits. So unfortunately - I didn't have the same connection as you.

I was not offended in the slightest by anything and yes it was appropriate for the show. That was the point - it was fitting into the subject matter and the audience reaction was as if it suddenly happened and was not expected. Sorry for not making myself more clear. I was surprised that the audience around me found offensive to the point of audible shock and awe. The dialogue and jokes fit the show but they were expected even when the cast was doing the "I'm going to one up your joke" part. A lot of it felt tired and has already been done before. All In The Family show even crossed my mind with me thinking "haven't I seen this on a situation comedy before?"

Yes - agree - better than yawn but what I really enjoyed was one big old guy sitting in the box seat with the deepest heartiest belly laugh, enjoying himself, giving himself a frequent knee slap and just being into the show. That was great to see.

[Patash]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:16am

OK, I hate to beat a dead horse and maybe I just haven't had enough coffee yet, but I'm still confused by what you say. You seem to be saying the "jokes" were expected and tired and done before, yet you make a point of saying they were unexpected by the audience to the point of causing shock and awe. I guess I'm just lost as to those two totally opposing ideas. If they are "done to death" then what caused shock and awe in the audience? What am I missing here?

[Brian07663NJ]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:24am

That is my point exactly Patash - you got it. I want to know the same thing. Why was the audience shocked? Why were they gasping?

[frogs_fan85]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:28am

I think it's more a question of personal experience. I'm guessing that for Brian the material was neither new nor shocking, but maybe to a vast majority of the audience that attended with him the material was new/shocking?

[Patash]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 10:32am

OK, another cup of coffee and now I think I'm with you. I get it. Thanks. I guess my response now would be the same as frogs_fan85.

[Kad]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 11:11am

I wasn't impressed with the play, either- and I am familiar with Raisin in the Sun. The first act, which does run most parallel to Raisin, is stronger than the second, whose sole purpose seems to be a vehicle for racial jokes and the moral, "everyone's racist"- which Avenue Q managed to do in one song.

The deaf character in the first act seems to exist solely to be the butt of jokes (although one is pretty funny), and Christina Kirk is giving one of the worst performances I have seen on Broadway in a while.

[Brian07663NJ]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 11:35am

Kad...hilarious - I've never seen Christina Kirk perform before and I found my eye gravitating to her a lot. When she opened her mouth and spoke I kept thinking Edith Bunker...dumb stuff coming out of her mouth. The only difference is that Edith was actually smarter than she appeared and both of Christina's characters just 'played' dumb to me without Edith's intelligence behind it.

Agree - the deaf character was just the butt of jokes.

I also did not like the opening of each act. Thought the dialogue about cities and places in both acts to be a "WTF" way to start this before we get into the drama.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 7:33pm

The problem is that Christina has a natural lisp that makes her sound super dumb all of the time. I've seen her in about 5 different plays, and she always comes across that way. I don't find it charming at all. I find it irritating.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 7:35pm

First review of the night.

Entertainment Weekly is positive (A):

"The aforementioned jokes may be questionably funny — high-minded liberal mom-to-be Lindsey (Annie Parisse) calls them 'disgusting,' 'juvenile,' and products of 'the worst possible type of obsolete bulls--- stereotypes.' (We know she's liberal because she tells us: 'Half of my friends are black' and 'I used to date a black guy.') Bruce Norris' drama, however, is indisputably, uproariously funny, and a quietly evocative mediation on the by-no-means-obsolete stereotypes that pervade millennial melting-pot America."

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20588543,00.html

It's funny... what EW pointed out is exactly why I HATE the play. I feel like it TELLS you everything about the characters rather than SHOW you. It's all "let me describe myself" in a totally inorganic way.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 7:40pm

The AP is positive:

"The cast and their director have been together since the play debuted at Playwrights Horizon in early 2010, and it shows. There is an ease and richness to the way each actor has mastered their own timing and motivation. Overlapping dialogue is handled like a ballet.

Hard as it is to single out one actor for the highest praise, it has to be Shamos, who plays Karl with a mannered nerdiness and Steve with such a panicky exasperation that the audience as a whole seems to want to go up on stage, slap him and end his misery in each act."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120419/us-theater-review-clybourne-park/

He also seems to imply that he thinks it will win the Tony.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 7:43pm

amNY is positive (4 stars):

""Clybourne Park," Bruce Norris' shameless and brilliant satire of race, liberal attitudes, white flight and gentrification in suburbia, ought to have transferred straight to Broadway right after its lauded Off-Broadway premiere at Playwrights Horizons two seasons ago.

After being produced around the country and in London and winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the entire Off-Broadway cast has reunited for a much deserved Broadway run."

http://www.amny.com/urbanite-1.812039/theater-review-clybourne-park-4-stars-1.3671399

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 8:06pm

Backstage is mixed to negative withe QUITE the burn at the end:

"Norris spends Act 1 picking off the expected 1950s targets—racial bigotry, religious hypocrisy, repression of women, suffocating social conformity—with reasonable flair. What he can’t do, however, is give the characters much substance, which dooms his attempt to invoke emotional heft through a family tragedy involving Russ and Bev’s deceased son, Kenneth. Act 2 is less predictable but more rickety, featuring some unpersuasive behavior from Lindsey and the awfully pat juxtaposition of Lena’s racism with Karl’s. The coda, referencing Kenneth’s death, is entirely unsuccessful.

...

Ultimately, “Clybourne Park” entertains without ever unsettling. I confess to having been mystified by that Pulitzer. Then I remembered that “Harvey” bested “The Glass Menagerie” back in 1945."

http://www.backstage.com/bso/reviews-ny-theatre-broadway/ny-review-clybourne-park-1006821752.story

[swoboda]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 8:48pm

Pulitzer or not, I thoroughly enjoyed this. If I'm laughing heartily and crying almost uncontrollably during a performance that is my best measure of fulfillment. Without spoiling anything, the second act reveals connections to the characters in the first act which deepens the significance of the issues dealt with in the piece. I felt like I was treated to two mini-stories which were melded into one powerful assessment of where we are, and where we were with regard to race relations.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:00pm

Variety is the same review from the Mark Taper Forum, and it's positive:

"Rarely in American drama have the gaps between what one wants to say, how one says it and what one really feels been as hilariously explored for dramatic effect as Norris is able to pull off here. There are secrets in this house and surprises, too, expertly managed by helmer Pam MacKinnon on Daniel Ostling's thematically expressive set, in the hands of a brilliant and versatile company. All are united in the task of peeling back society's veneer to confront the terrors lurking below the surface.

"Clybourne Park" has no easy answers for the questions it raises about the historical roots and present-day dimensions of racial disharmony. But it sharpens the viewer's antennae for the obfuscation in which we timidly traffic when trying to discuss those questions, and that's a public service right there."

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117946930

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:05pm

Talkin' Broadway is positive (that's two positive reviews in a row for Murray... hell must be freezing over):

"But Clybourne Park continues to work — and, one suspects, will for many years to come — because its underlying assumptions about who the most accepting are, and just how seriously they take their tolerance, always seem to be correct. Ask anyone in either time period and they'd all scream that no horrific words would ever escape their lips. And you'd believe those protestations just as easily as you do the anger and the resentment they reveal when they say them aloud. They've found niches within their social and cultural worlds, but haven't found satisfaction. Can't it be right there, in front of them all, in this house that has promised advancement and freedom for three generations of black and white alike? It can be, and it is. But Norris reminds us that you haven't a prayer of seeing it, or anything else, until your eyes are well and truly open."

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/index.html

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:08pm

Philadelphia Inquirer is a rave with another prediction that it wins the Tony:

"“Clybourne Park” is the fiercest, frankest, funniest discussion of race I have seen on a stage. It is smooth — taut, realistic and stringing together ideas about real estate and racial perceptions. Its playwright, Bruce Norris, is a skillful manipulator who mines an audience’s willingness to self-indict, provoking theatergoers with mouth-dropping lines and making them laugh at the same time.

The show, almost surely en route to a Tony Award as best new play this season, offers up two eras of American life a half-century apart — 1959 and 2009 — to suggest that although the idea of diversity has taken hold and brought many changes, not much has changed in the basic way people think about race. Yet “Clybourne Park” is anything but cynical. Mostly, it’s revealing."

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/148134915.html

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:11pm

Newsday is positive

"The play -- which opened Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2010 before regional stagings, an Olivier from London and the Pulitzer -- has finally gotten to Broadway with director Pam MacKinnon's original impeccable production and cast. While the tragicomedy struck me two years ago as a bit tidy compared with Norris' earlier and more dangerously messy "The Pain and the Itch," I'm now appreciating "Clybourne Park" on its own important and enjoyable terms."

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/theater/clybourne-park-an-edgy-look-at-race-1.3669124

Nice to see that she's jumping on the bandwagon this time since she feels like she missed it last time around...

Updated On: 4/19/12 at 09:11 PM

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:15pm

The Hollywood Reporter is positive:

"Where he falters mildly is in a conclusion that retreats into the history of the house. This works to poignant effect, yet it remains too oblique in its connection to the central issue, even if Norris’ intentions are clear. Still, this is a needling, insightful work, as excruciating as it is funny. And with MacKinnon masterfully steering the wheel, the cast hits every unnerving bump in the road, whether it’s in the hazardous words or the festering discord that lies beneath them."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/clybourne-park-theater-review-314189

[drewmangroup]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:37pm

Reading people's responses to the play, I can see and respect them. When I saw that play last week, however, I thought it was solid and still think so. I wasn't shocked by any of it - figured it was there for us to observe. I think it's strength is in the contrast of the two acts.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 9:39pm

The Faster Times is mixed to positive:

"But will “Clybourne Park” endure the way “A Raisin in the Sun” has? Will it stir people 50 years from now? Norris’s play lacks Hansberry’s heart or optimism, and it seems unwilling to let the characters fully live their own lives; they seem to exist primarily to be skewered or to embody arguments. The accolades “Clybourne Park” has received (a production of it in London also resulted in its winning the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play) may say more about our era than the play itself does.

...

Jeremy Shamos stands out, first as Karl Linder in the first act, with nervous tics and forced smiles, and then in the second as Steve, more relaxed but clearly also uncomfortable around black people, who wants to buy the Clybourne Park house, raze it, and build something bigger that sticks out in the neighborhood. Frank Wood is more subtle and just as effective as Russ, the irascible mourning father in the first act, and as a blue-collar worker on the house in the second. In my review of the production at Playwrights Horizons, I singled out Crystal Dickinson, who plays Francine the maid of 1959 forced into a resentful subservience and Lena the proud homeowner of 2009. But I find her performance now tipped too far into a one-note resentment. It is extremely telling to me that Dickinson was quoted in a recent article explaining her reaction to the play, and her part in it: “If somebody hurts your feelings, you remember that feeling – it lives in you,” she said. “Now imagine that feeling 17 times in a row.”"

http://www.thefastertimes.com/newyorktheater/2012/04/19/clybourne-park-broadway-review/

Updated On: 4/19/12 at 09:39 PM

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 10:07pm

Theatremania is positive:

"With the often-scathing, hilarious, and thought-provoking satire, Clybourne Park, now at Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre -- two years after its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons -- playwright Bruce Norris proves once again why he's one of the theater world's shining lights, and why this play was so deserving of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. And Pam McKinnon's expertly directed, thrillingly acted production does this extraordinary work full justice.

No doubt, there will be plenty of post-show discussion about the themes of racism and social change that Norris explores in the play -- while simultaneously splitting open your sides -- but savvy theatergoers will also be talking about the playwright's gifts for ingenuity and craftsmanship."

http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/reviews/04-2012/clybourne-park_54736.html

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 10:11pm

NY Times (Brantley again) is positive:

"As for this country, well just think of what it’s heard since the winter of 2010: the divisive shouting over the killing of the African-American youth Trayvon Martin; the horrified gasps over the charges that an American soldier massacred Afghan civilians; and the warm bath of applause that greeted the movie “The Help,” a sentimental story of black domestic workers and their employers in the South.

Though those events were all in the future when “Clybourne Park” was written, this play addresses them all, or at least what they stand for. Usually, when a work is as topical as this one is, it has a limited shelf life. Yet returning to “Clybourne Park” — which features its original excellent cast and sure-footed director, Pam MacKinnon — I realized that this play probably will be topical for many years to come. That’s bad news for America, but good news for theatergoers, as “Clybourne Park” proves itself more vital and relevant than ever on a big Broadway stage."

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/theater/reviews/clybourne-park-by-bruce-norris-at-walter-kerr-theater.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1334887716-G3XTgvhazHdYT45SaLztpA