CLYBOURNE PARK Reviews- Page 2

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 10:16pm

The Village Voice is positive:

"The play is generally pretty dry, but the well intentioned points of view, politically correct self-defenses, and sardonic flareups catch comic fire under Pam MacKinnon's direction.

While the white folk generally come off clueless, tasteless, or scheming, the largely liberal white audience ate it up the night I saw the show. (Nothing like guffawing over other silly whites.)

The result (and the coda) can be heavy handed but in the context of such a bold gimmick, the incisive Clybourne Park is worth spending 50 years with, especially since I'm guessing tourists are gonna hate this!"

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/dailymusto/2012/04/pulitzer_winnin_1.php

[bjh2114]

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

The Wall Street Journal is negative with the best title of the night:

"It happens that I was on the road throughout last year's off-Broadway run of "Clybourne Park," and ever since then I've been wondering what I missed. Was it really possible that a playwright had finally gotten up the nerve to take an unsparingly honest look at race relations in America? Stranger things have happened—but not this time around. "Clybourne Park" turns out to be a runny egg, a play that pretends to be daring but takes the utmost care not to be too challenging to the assumptions of its viewers.

...

What makes the success of "Clybourne Park" so interesting is that American theater is a monoculture, a thick-walled bubble in which you'll look long and hard to find anyone with an opinion about anything that is anywhere other than well to the left of center. The trouble with monocultures, of course, is that they tend not to encourage self-criticism. Hence it's always worthy of note whenever a playwright dares to take shots at his own side. The bad news is that the comedy in "Clybourne Park" amounts to little more than lazy caricature. This is especially evident in the first act, which is peopled with vapid stick figures who appear to be drawn not from real life but from an Eisenhower-era television sitcom. If that's Mr. Norris's idea of satire, he needs to sharpen his pencil. Even the two black characters are long-suffering Noble Negroes, a clanking cliché that American playwrights should have outgrown long ago."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303425504577353922386713222.html

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 10:21pm

NJ Newsroom is positive:

"Observantly dressed by designer Ilona Somogyi, a well-meshed ensemble of seven excellent actors confidently invests their characters of 1959 and 2009 with distinctive personalities under director Pam MacKinnon’s discerning guidance. Designer Daniel Ostling provides a realistic setting that poignantly suffers the passing years.

A smartly-written play sure to provoke conversation afterwards, “Clybourne Park” may be too emotionally cool to please sentimental viewers, but many others are sure to enjoy the nasty conflicts that erupt when presumably nice people show their true colors."

http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/new-york-theater/review-visit-clybourne-park

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 10:44pm

NY Post is positive (3.5 stars out of 4):

"Under Pam McKinnon’s sharp direction, the ensemble, which created the show at Playwrights Horizons two years ago, vividly renders different yet oddly similar characters over a 50-year gap.

Shamos particularly shines as men who act surprised by the reactions — ranging from squirming to outraged — they provoke.

Norris has an especially keen ear for PC talk on both sides of the racial divide, and how everybody’s just out to protect their turf.

In 1959, Karl advises Russ against “disregarding the needs of the people who live in a community.” In 2009, it’s Lena who warns the newcomers and their architect (Kirk) that “there’s just a lot of pride, and a lot of memories in these houses.”

Without making a big deal of it — this isn’t a show that rams a message down your throat — Norris suggests that no one, whether neighbors, family or friends, actually listens to each other.

Karl’s wife may be hearing-impaired, but in “Clybourne Park,” many are hilariously, sadly, tone-deaf."

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/theater/race_to_this_park_RJKMHGj9gapL1pf9N5TKFJ

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 10:48pm

Bloomberg is mixed to positive:

"Under Pam MacKinnon’s seamless direction, there are remarkable performances from actors who have been living in their dual roles since the play’s off-Broadway premiere two years ago.

Nevertheless, I still found “Clybourne Park” a confused work. Norris has a fine ear for dialogue, but muddled dramaturgy. A melodramatic backstory concerning a son’s suicide and a buried trunk seems tacked on and some of the repartee -- notably arguments about capital cities in the first act that are echoed in the second -- undermine the otherwise naturalistic storytelling."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-20/pride-prejudice-confront-bigotry-in-clybourne-review.html

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 11:14pm

NY Daily News is positive (4 out of 5 stars):

"Norris (“The Pain and the Itch”) doesn’t waste words or mince them. His script is lean and mean and raises smart ideas about great divides between races, classes and sexes. He also lands some stinging swats at lame political correctness.

Pam MacKinnon guides a first-class design team and a cast of seven, who reprise roles from 2010 and are terrific top-to-bottom. Each actor delivers vividly varied characters as they leap through eras and tonal shifts, including the sometimes too cartoony first act.

Outside the Walter Kerr, where “Clybourne Park” is rattling nerves, mock street signs cleverly spell out the title of the play in white letters set against black and in black letters against white. The X-shaped intersecting signs mark a crossroad, seemingly an inevitable place for change. Nope, not always."

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/review-pulitzer-winner-clybourne-park-tackles-race-real-estate-class-broadway-article-1.1064205

[Ed_Mottershead]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 11:14pm

I'd have to do a stretch to remember when three new plays in a row got almost unanimously postive reviews. At least from a non-musical point of view, this is turning out to be a fine season for new plays. And we still haven't seen the results for The Lyons and The Columnist. Hope each and every one of them gets the public support they sound roundly deserve.

[Kad]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 11:28pm

This reviews really floor me. I found the essays in the Lincoln Center program that was offered at the show to raise far better questions than the play. To me, the show desperately wanted to have A BIG THEME! and RAISE QUESTIONS!, but succeeded in only acting like it had a big theme and raising nothing new.

And I really don't see how anyone can describe Kirk as excellent. Her lisp aside- I didn't feel there was a genuine moment from her at all.

[Tom5]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 11:39pm

Great reviews notwithstanding I can't think of a more stultifying subject for a play than race relations vis a vis property values. Perhaps if this were 1950...

[Matt2]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 11:48pm

"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."

Thank you Bjh, you hit what I felt was the show's major flaw right on the head. Also, like Kad, I felt Clybourne worked too hard to have A BIG THEME! rather than organically developing one. It just felt forced and completely false.

[After Eight]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 11:49pm

I've long said the Wall Street Journal has the only decent theatre critic in NY.

[Kad]

Posted: 4/19/12 at 11:56pm

I can't believe I agree with both After Eight AND Terry Teachout. Day is night and cats are dogs. But Teachout pretty much nails it for me. The play is self-congratulatory and easy, full of false people and easy shots. Of course audiences will laugh at people very much like themselves acting like Norris' characters in the second act. It's the laughter of, "Oh, thank GOD we're much better than that!" Swapping racial jokes is supposed to make the audience turn inward and examine themselves?

F*CK, all one has to do is read the thread about the King and I revival to see a better discourse about race in modern America.

[themysteriousgrowl]

Posted: 4/20/12 at 7:38am

I'm skimming through this thread, as I have with most of the other CP discussions because I won't get to see the show until the end of June, but I can't help noticing it being referred to with some frequency as a "satire" on racial issues... which hadn't been my impression. Would those who have seen the show -- particularly its detractors -- agree with that?

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/20/12 at 8:00am

No.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/20/12 at 8:05am

Huffington Post is positive:

"Racial insults fly like shrapnel across the stage. That Norris serves them as uproarious comedy, and the audience responds in guffaws, begs the question "why are we laughing?" The answer might be more uncomfortable than many would like to believe. Many gags are clichés -- a white housewife trying to foist her chafing dish onto her black maid, or the old "some of my best friends ..." defense. Others -- told by whites about blacks and by blacks about whites -- are of the locker-room variety that most people stop laughing at by the 9th grade. As Lena says after one particularly crude joke, "It's not funny," then proceeds to tell one of her own. Norris doesn't stop with racist humor. In one raucous scene, he manages to skewer gays, army veterans and breast-cancer victims.

Norris has constructed Clybourne Park, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, with meticulous symmetry. Each act begins with repartee about world geography, and some racist allusions of the first act ("where do you find skiing Negroes?") are revisited in the second (Kevin and Lena are just back from a skiing holiday in Zurich). If the characters often seem stereotyped, they credibly depict recognizable attitudes."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wilborn-hampton/clybourne-park-review_b_1435841.html

[themysteriousgrowl]

Posted: 4/20/12 at 8:05am

I see. Thank you.

[bjh2114]

Posted: 4/20/12 at 8:10am

Bergen Record is mixed to negative:

""Clybourne Park," which opened Thursday night at the Walter Kerr Theatre, is a play about race that's considerably more arresting in the moment than it is on reflection.

Author Bruce Norris writes amusing, snappy dialogue, and has a keen eye for human frailty, if not much sympathy for it. But, when you poke beneath the surface, there's little that's fresh, or really provocative.

...

In his mean-spirited ignorance, Karl is an amusingly appalling character, and Norris gets the rhythm of his blathering exactly right. But we've seen his type before, and poking fun at him isn't exactly adventurous.

...

Norris has a gift for capturing people at their worst, and the production, effectively directed by Pam MacKinnon and impeccably acted, is excellent.

But the message of "Clybourne Park" that race still divides people in America doesn't exactly land with the force of revelation."

http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/148217755_There_goes_the_neighborhood_.html?page=all

[Owen22]

Posted: 4/20/12 at 12:58pm

Did people fail to notice that two of the worst reviews came from decidedly right wing sources? Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg? Just sayin'...

I find "Clybourne Park" to be the best American play I've seen in years. And I saw it for the first time in London! I do admit when I saw it again at Steppenwolf last fall I didn't love it as much but I chalked it up to a) the surprise factor being gone, and that b) the cast wasn't quite as good (in London it included Sophie Thompson, Emma's talented sis, as the mother and the racist from "Raisin" was marvelously played by Martin Freeman from the Brit "Office" and "Sherlock" (and will be Bilbo Baggins). Not to say I didn't think the writing when I saw it again wasn't just as good, just as pointed, just as funny and just as heart-breaking.

Updated On: 4/20/12 at 12:58 PM

[TalkinLoud]

Posted: 4/20/12 at 1:10pm

Kad, did you like "Next Fall." The way you describe "Clybourne Park" is exactly how I felt about "Next Fall."

I haven't seen Clybourne yet, but wondering if it might be a similar situation for me.

[cornerstone7]

Posted: 4/20/12 at 1:15pm

Not convinced it means anything, but that point certainly is interesting that the 2 most negative reviews came from the more "right wing" sources Bloomberg and WSJ. Then again, the conservative NY Post loved it.

On Curtain Critic, the WSJ and Bloomberg are the only 2 non-gold scores.
http://www.curtaincritic.com/Shows/CLYBOURNE_PARK_REVIEWS-141.html
The scores for it there are
89 Overall
89 Cast
89 Script
87 Tech

[Kad]

Posted: 4/20/12 at 5:57pm

I liked Next Fall more, but I can see why you would argue that.