Think of it as a variant on a theme. In Bruce Norris's play, Clybourne Park, the dramatic plot begins with a stock portrayal of oft-glorified 1950's suburban America. A white middle class family is packing to move house. The home is cheerful to the signal of nausea.Their black maid and her husband are going above and beyond to help. All is good in the Commons to start with but then things start to unravel.
We read that the house is moving to run a recent trauma. Neighbours and the local pastor arrive to carry their care for the house and their discomfort with the fact that their home is being purchased by a negro family - the neighbourhood's second showing the start of a trend. The dark maid and her husband express their discomfort with being dragged in to the centre of an ensuing argument. Clybourne Park hurriedly becomes the overture to 1960's Watts in Los Angeles or 1980's Brixton in London. The strife is both intra- and interracial.
What makes Clybourne Park different is that it follows the racial life cycle of the home from whiteness to negro to white again. The second act begins with a housing association meeting being run by middle class black leaders who are interviewing a white middle class couple wanting to buy the identical same house decades later. Clever, but is it too cunning to get an interview for 2 hours?
I think Norris is onto something here but not because of his recognisable portrait of inner city transformations. The true champion is in how he deftly demonstrates the overlapping nature of social 'isms'. In the second act, initial charges of racism lead promptly to accusations of sexism, homophobia, and expressions of religious intolerance belying the accuracy that goes unspoken in the sport but that manages to follow through loud and clearly.
Racism, sexism, homophobia and religious intolerance are but symptoms of abortive attempts to forget the anxiety produced by the exposure that we all part in being human. It's the 1950's family's failure to work their trauma that forces them to betray the theater and results in neighbour being pitted against neighbour. It's the white-on-black, black-on-white fear of losing one's way of animation that causes each to whip out against one another. It's a white character's discomfort with interacting with his future black neighbour that leads to his poorly-timed racially-tinged joke. It's the decades of repressed anger that causes a dark woman character to unabashedly and callously forgo an offering to link over gender and instead attack her white female neighbour-to-be. The content is clear. Because we don't express our anxieties and work them on a day-to-day basis, we're lost to rule others on whom to see them.
If I were to criticize the work at all, it would be in its failure to assault the veracity of categories we use to separate ourselves. Nowadays, it seems a bit dated for clean and fatal to attack one another with such little taste for shared ground. Also, Norris, a white-American playwright, could have been a bit more balanced in his depiction of bigotry. Blacks came across largely as victimised beings with reactive anger. I believe there's much about black anger that isn't reactive but rather an aspect of individual existential crisis. Blacks are people too that conflict and fix mistakes like anyone would. However, overall this was an enjoyable and edifying night at the theatre.
Kudos to Dominic Cooke, director of the fun and Artistic Director of the Imperial Court Theatre. Cooke created a highly synchronised and well-cast piece to be remembered.
No comments:
Post a Comment