Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer-winning satire Clybourne Park gets a nigh-perfect production to kick off Otterbein University’s Summer Theatre Season.
Clybourne Park starts from a high concept. The two acts are set in the house the family in Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun were set to move into at the end of that play. The first act is set shortly after the earlier play, with married couple Russ (Jack Labrecque) and Bev (Dana Cullinane) preparing, with the help of their domestic worker Francine (Morgan Wood), to move out of their home in the eponymous Chicago neighborhood to the suburbs in 1959. The second act is set exactly 50 years later when a young married couple, Lindsey (Aubree Tally) and Steve (Alex Armesto), have purchased the house and are preparing to tear it down to build a larger, more modern home, on the day they’re confronted by a neighborhood petition to set up ground rules to preserve the “historic character” of the neighborhood.
Photo by Ed Syguda.
Norris’ play is haunted by ghosts. A specter of death looms more obviously in the first, set in the shadow of the Korean War. Very quickly Russ’ aw-shucks sitcom dad has layers burned away by Bev’s bringing up the questions of other people about why he no longer engages with their friends and the appearance of a neighborhood pastor. Labrecque is magnificent as a man being whittled down to a raw nerve, whose silence and avoidance are desperate, failing coping mechanisms. Cullinane is perfect as someone hurting just as deeply, but coping by trying to live as though the horrible thing never happened. They’re magic and deeply sad together.
The outside world, represented by a local pastor (Peter Moses) and the weaselly businessman from Rain in the Sun, Karl Lindner (Alex Armesto), tell the insidious – so sure of themselves – story of white flight in a spiraling, cringe-inducing “discussion” including condescending, leading questions about where Francine and her husband Albert (JT Wood) would prefer to live and what kind of “amenities” they’d look for. The second half of the first act is nail-biting and inevitable, the audience begging for an outcome other than what’s happening, but the twist is ultimately a reminder that sometimes progress is helped along by purely selfish, spiteful, angry acts, and that civility is frequently just a frightened lie. Moses and Armesto are fantastic as the two sides of that ugly coin; the latter’s loathsomeness is more on the surface. Labrecque’s final tearing down and explication of exactly what that community failed to do for his son, and Morgan and JT Wood’s confrontation that disrupts her fragile working balance are heartbreaking.
The death isn’t as acknowledged by the characters until the heart-wrenching ending, but it’s written all over the skin of the second act. The house set – in an astonishing design with kudos to set designer Dan Gray, master carpenters Ian Hawthorne and Mason Mickley, production manager Kristen Cooperkline, and technical director Patrick Stone – has a drop down to show graffiti including an abstracted lynching and the detritus of squatters. It takes place in the bones of the community, about to be tossed away and not thought of again. Just as the only real joy that appears from Russ in the first act is about the time of his new commute from their suburban house, Alex Armesto’s Steve seems interested only in how close the neighborhood is to his downtown office. For all his and Aubree Tally’s Lindsey’s protestations that they love the neighborhood, nothing about them seems anything other than sheltered, privileged, and used to getting their way – an acidic parody of the kind of people who claim to “not see race” and played perfectly, with sharp comedic timing.
Tally’s character in the first act is deaf so she’s an easy release valve for laughs and also a poignant mirror for what’s happening; in the second act her character’s the center, not a bad person but just a little bit confused, even baffled, that she’s not immediately loved or at least given the benefit of the doubt. Watching her layers split and burst on a less fraught but parallel track to Labrecque’s Russ in the first act is astonishing, her performance giving some humanity to an act that verges on tedious and indulges some of the smugness of which Norris has been accused. Morgan Wood’s Lena gives a brilliant performance as the most fascinating character in this act, aware she’s not being heard but determined to speak until she can’t be ignored, and the only person there who cares about the neighborhood as a neighborhood. Her coiled rage is mediated – or attempted to be – by JT Wood’s Kevin, her husband who grew up in the same neighborhood and works in securities downtown – another interesting, complex character I wish we got to know more in the time that gets wasted on “ironically” offensive jokes that reveal their true meaning and anger, a trope we’ve all seen too many times.
For those qualms about the second act, Clybourne Park packs a hard punch. It has enough to say about the world at large and our ugliness to one another that it feels full to bursting at times. Lenny Leibowitz’s direction milks every beat for all it’s worth, getting jaw-dropping performances out of every member of this exceptional cast. After the final moments, it felt like the audience had a few seconds before we exhaled, much less clapped. It left me shaking, shaking all the way down.
Otterbein University’s production of Clybourne Park continues Thursday June 11 through Saturday June 13. Tickets are $25. For more information, visit Otterbein.edu.