RSS FeedClybourne Park = Downtown DC?
It’s hard to imagine a more suitable production than Clybourne Park (photo credit above: Stan Barouh) now showing at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre (641 D St, NW) for the post-real estate bubble era and the accompanying gentrifying force sweeping through urban downtowns all over the United States. Anyone shopping for a DC home in the summer of 2006 at the bubble’s zenith could tour open houses on a given Sunday and find a city rehab that might be characterized as a gentrifying listing. While the city depicted in this Bruce Norris play is Chicago, there’s no doubt it could be set in parts of Washington, DC.
In the first half of the play, we meet Russ and Bev, a middle aged white couple who have recently sold their home to a black family, a race different from the majority in the Chicago enclave of Clybourne Park. Later we meet the flawed Karl speaking on behalf of the community association who elicits gasps and awws from the audience with his decidedly segregation era thinking and attempts to sway Russ away from selling the house to the new impending residents. But Russ and Bev won’t have it and the sale moves forward. Since PQ Living is not in the business of being a spoiler, suffice to say that the culmination preceding the intermission completes a gradually assembled mystery as to why this house sale is taking place. The second act fast forwards fifty years to 2009 and the reverse is happening with a white couple, Lindsey and Steve, purchasing, gutting and rehabbing this same home which is now part of a majority black community. Kevin and Lena, the current stewards of the community association, raise questions about the new couple’s motives through the lens of their own experiences. A somber scene finishes off the first act’s finish and also ends the production. Discussions about race relations, what is considered offensive, the definition of racism, the meaning of ghetto and a stab at the very heart of what comprises a community and its gentrification are interlaced through a perfectly and intricately woven tapestry of dialogue that alternately builds tension and then releases that same tension with well timed humorous jabs.
Could this narrative be about the Penn Quarter and downtown DC? We think it unlikely since much of the Penn Quarter and the core of downtown DC have been a commercial district, at least in recent times. When we came downtown during high school and college in the 80s and 90s, it was to go dancing in commerical/industrial spaces you didn’t want to see when the lights came on at 3 AM, not a solidly residential neighborhood for raising a family. The ’00s were when we moved in and condo residences replaced businesses while other commercial and retail buildings in the area got upgrades or were replaced wholesale. But the displacement aspect of gentrification does apply downtown as Chinatown has shrunk to Chinablock and may get smaller yet. Expand the radius outward north of New York Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue, however, and you may get a better answer as dilapidated rowhouses and subsidized housing can be found interleaved with new condos and rehabbed shells. The neighborhood narratives as told by various neighborhood websites in the greater downtown area and prices that sometimes seem to strain towards those found in upper northwest DC bear this out.
Clybourne Park is far and away the most accessible and arguably the best play we’ve seen at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre. The diction represents the time periods portrayed, the issues raised are current, the timing of delivery executed by the actors excellent, the characters spun to be absolutely believable and the set cleverly crafted. It is noteworthy to say that the majority of the audience sits in front of the cutaway house that serves as the stage but there are a few rows “behind” the dining room window opposite the primary audience that give those viewers a unique perspective of the production. One criticism we can level at the script is that governmental social policies aimed at creating evenly spaced rungs of social and economic opportunity never get a mention but that is a minor point given the larger picture and many topics addressed. Running time was just over two hours but it felt like no time passed at all which was probably the most telling part of the whole evening.
Clybourne Park
By Bruce Norris
Woolly Mammoth Theatre
641 D St, NW
Showing through April 17, 2010
Tickets available at the box office in person, by phone at 202-393-3939 or online
PQ Living reader discount code: 788
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