Clybourne Park Off Broadway OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

NY TIMES
VARIETY
TM
EW
THE FASTER TIMES

Opening Night:: February 21, 2010
Closing:: March 21, 2010

Theater: Playwrights Horizons / 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, 10036

Synopsis:

Who are the people in your neighborhood? In 1959, a white family moves out. In 2009, a white family moves in. In the intervening years, change overtakes a neighborhood, along with attitudes, inhabitants, and property values. Loosely inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Bruce Norris' pitch-black comedy takes on the specter of gentrification in our communities, leaving no stone unturned in the process.

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NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF Clybourne Park Off Broadway

Good Defenses Make Good Neighbors
Ben Brantley

February 22, 2010: It takes a special vision, both clear and cockeyed, to see the present as if it were the past. Half a century separates the two acts of Bruce Norris’s “Clybourne Park,” a spiky and damningly insightful new comedy set in 1959 and 2009. In both parts of this production, which opened Sunday night at Playwrights Horizons, Mr. Norris is examining his subjects through the same merciless telescope, with a historian’s distance and an ethnographer’s detachment.
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VARIETY REVIEW OF Clybourne Park Off Broadway

Clybourne Park
Marilyn Stasio

February 21, 2010: In "Clybourne Park," Bruce Norris speaks to that thing people always say about a house with a lot of history: "If these walls could only talk." When the play opens in Chicago in 1959, the modest home in a nice neighborhood that a white couple has just sold to a black family (think "A Raisin in the Sun") is already burdened with one dark secret. That secret will resurface in 2009, when a white couple prepares to move into the now-run-down house in what has become a black neighborhood. But while the walls do talk, they don't speak with any real strength of conviction.
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THEATERMANIA REVIEW OF Clybourne Park Off Broadway

Clybourne Park
Brian Scott Lipton

February 22, 2010: With his often-scathing new satire, Clybourne Park, now getting a thrillingly crackerjack production at Playwrights Horizons, Bruce Norris once again proves he's no mere provocateur. 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.
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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY REVIEW OF Clybourne Park Off Broadway

Clybourne Park
Melissa Rose Bernardo

February 26, 2010: Anyone remotely offended by foul language, off-color jokes, and racial stereotypes should steer clear of Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park, now receiving its world premiere at Off Broadway's Playwrights Horizons. But those thin-skinned theatergoers would be missing an absolute corker — a completely audacious, architecturally ingenious entertainment.
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THE FASTER TIMES REVIEW OF Clybourne Park Off Broadway

Clybourne Park Review: White Update of Raisin In The Sun
Jonathan Mandell

February 21, 2010: It is one of the most moving scenes in American theater, that moment in “A Raisin in the Sun” when Walter Younger, originally played by Sidney Poitier, tells Karl Lindner of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association that he and his (black) family are moving into their (white) neighborhood, that they can’t be bought off. Lorraine Hansberry’s play ends shortly afterwards on a hopeful and inspiring note.
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